


Revenant: A Christmas Carol

by charade



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canon-Typical Gore, Child Abuse, Flashbacks, Gen, Hauntings, Horror, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, References to A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens, Suicidal Ideation, The Sunlit Garden, and all related warnings, emetophobia content warning, general washuu family trigger and content warnings, it/its pronouns used to indicate something inhuman, minor depictions and implications of illness, please watch for added tags for future chapters, see: all related sunlit garden warnings, tiny minor narrator gimmicks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:34:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28306134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charade/pseuds/charade
Summary: When Matsuri opens the door to his apartment on Christmas Eve, there is a ghost inside.This is a ghost story. A haunting. A history. A story about what does not stay dead.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	1. A Ghost Story: Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please mind the warnings in the tags. This is a story about growing up in the Washuu household. Of what's planned, this part is milder, but it's still explicit child abuse and other less explicit implications.
> 
> An additional note on the tags: I'm obviously supportive of anyone whose pronouns are it/its - that's why I added the warning, in case anyone who uses those are uncomfortable with this as a stylistic choice.

_Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail._

_Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail._

_\- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol_

* * *

When Matsuri opens the door to his apartment on Christmas Eve, there is a ghost inside.

This is a ghost story, just so you know.

The ghost is sitting on a chair, just visible from the entranceway, a single light on partially illuminating its pallor. 

“Welcome home,” the ghost says.

Matsuri reaches towards his umbrella stand. 

“Looking for this? Really?”

The ghost waves something reflective into the light. It holds the quinque gun lazily, messily, twirling it around. It hums as it opens the chamber and lets the bullets inside clink onto the ground. One lands on the chair, instead, and the ghost picks it up gingerly.

As in life, in death, the ghost’s hands are covered in gloves. It slides the one bullet back into the gun. Spins it. Puts the barrel up against its own head. Chambers. Pulls the trigger.

Click.

The ghost lets out a sick, reedy laugh.

Then it points the gun towards the doorway, where Matsuri still stands, staring.

“Bang.”

Click.

It laughs again, sharper this time, and opens the chamber of the gun again, letting the single bullet fall out to join the others.

“Body parts all over the floor? Really, so messy. Never had to learn to clean up after yourself, did you. Ah— ” The ghost reaches into the pocket of an oversized coat, and pulls out a black box, about the size of a walkie-talkie, and wiggles it between two gloved fingers “—you really shouldn’t make me use this. It’s quite rude to all your neighbors. What if they were going to confess their love on Christmas Eve? For their sake, please do stop trying to make a phone call.” 

Matsuri pulls his hand out of his pocket, away from his cellphone. A signal jammer, then.

“I mean, you could always leave, I’m sure your phone would work just fine outside,” The ghost leans its cheek on its other hand, empty gun discarded. Deceptively casual. “But you’d look pretty silly when your apartment is empty when backup comes, don’t you think?”

“You’re dead,” Matsuri says, finally.

“Hmm?” The ghost cocks its head further into its hand, so far it looks like it might just roll off. “I am, aren’t I? But that’s the funny thing. I think you forgot to put my picture on the family shrine.”

It’s only then that Matsuri becomes aware of the smell of incense faintly permeating the apartment. 

“What did you do.” Matsuri’s voice is clipped. Self-controlled.

“I’m really sorry I missed the anniversary,” the ghost says. “But I’m home for Christmas!” It says those last words in English, which it seems to find very funny. It giggles at its own joke. Takes longer than is reasonable to stop giggling. “You don’t think they’ll mind, do you? That I was a little late with the offerings, I mean.”

What could be going on in Matsuri’s mind right now? The man who had overseen the death of his entire family, sitting there casually in his own home. Is it anger? Grief? Bloodlust, maybe? Sorrow? 

“I was a good boy,” the ghost continues, “Chanted the sutras and everything. Didn’t even draw little mustaches on portraits.”

What could be going on in Matsuri’s head, as he lunges forward? Are you sure you want to know?

I told you. This is a ghost story.

The thing about ghost stories is, they aren’t really about the ghost. Not really. It’s hardly a problem unique to ghosts, though. Monster movies, slasher flicks. If it’s called a ghost story, shouldn’t it be the ghost’s story to tell? They shouldn’t be able to get away with that, naming the whole genre for the antagonist and never telling that story. It’s quite rude.

But that’s just the way of things, isn’t it? Even if the audience is secretly cheering for the monster, it’s always the stupid teenagers who you have to spend time with. Not that Matsuri is a teenager, anymore.

He was, though. Once. 

Suzuki Matsuri wasn’t born Suzuki Matsuri. But you already knew that. It’s not that his childhood was easy. His mother (who was not the woman who gave birth to him) passed away when he was fairly young. It might even have been from natural causes. His family had all sorts of bizarre rituals and traditions, and even if his own father wasn’t in charge yet, that didn’t mean they didn’t start on him young. 

And, of course, when he was barely into his preadolescence, his grandfather had decided to let a very annoying little child into their house, even though it was quite improper, if you asked Matsuri. Not that anyone did. 

—

The ghost moves quickly. Too quickly. It’s on the chair one second and then, in one fluid movement nearly across the room. It brings something with it as it moves, a black briefcase that must have been tucked on the shadowed side of the chair before.

“Wah! Be careful! Isn’t that chair an antique?” 

—

But still, Matsuri’s childhood had been a privileged one. Surrounded by old, ornate things, and servants willing to answer to every beck and call. He never wanted for anything, certainly not food, and was allowed mostly free reign to spend his days in the house’s big library. Wherever he walked in that house, people gave him space, deference. He was the young master, after all. And he didn’t have to bother with what they thought, anyway. And he didn’t. 

Even when his grandfather did. Sat on his antique chair with a little brat who had no business being there, listening to the kid read from a book. Matsuri had also learned to read young. He wasn’t sure what the big deal was, other than being intelligent was expected of him, and a novelty for someone (something) like that boy.

—

Matsuri growls out a curse, into the dark of his apartment. 

“What was that?” the ghost says, features now mostly lost to the shadows. “If you’re going to call me names, you might as well be accurate. You have so many to choose from, after all. How about... bastard?” The ghost says the accusation in a different voice, over-exaggerated and probably mimicked from somewhere, not that Matsuri could place the inspiration.

It’s laughing again. 

Matsuri grabs at the gun, discarded on the chair, and the bullets, scattered on the floor. 

“Oh, come on now, can’t we talk about this?” The ghost almost sounds like it’s breathing heavily, but you can never really trust ghosts not to be deceiving you on something, even little details like that. Still, it seems solid enough. Solid enough to shoot.

Matsuri gets the bullets into the gun. A few of them anyway. Aims towards the shadowy figure and pulls the trigger with a click. And another. And another. And another.

Laughter. Again. He hates that sound. Always has.

—

Even as a preteen, Matsuri seemed to wear a constant scowl on his face, but one with plenty of room to deepen when things got on his nerves. Which they seemed to do a lot. Like when he was trying to read and he had to deal with a little kid sliding open the door to the reading room and slipping against the wall, finger over his mouth, as if Matsuri were the one making any noise.

“Get out.” Well, now he was.

The little boy shook his head. “Shh, I’m hiding.” He’d been smiling when he whispered it, and you could hear it in his voice. That little boy had always been smiling.

“Well, go hide somewhere else.” Matsuri glared over the top of his book. “Why don’t you just go back to where you belong and hide there.” Maybe that was mean to say, but Matsuri hadn’t considered it so. It was just the truth. The way things were. Were supposed to be.

There were footsteps out in the hall, then. Coming closer.

“He’s in here,” Matsuri had said. And went back to reading.

The door slid open again and some servant or another came in. “There you are,” they said.

“Oh,” said the brat. “Looks like you found me!” And he had laughed. High pitched and annoying.

Matsuri was just glad to be left alone again. 

—

“I know, as a millennial, it’s weird for me to say,” the ghost says, from the shadows, “but sometimes all this new tech is just kind of overrated.” 

Into the faint halo of the lamp, still the only real illumination, the ghost tosses something to the ground. Matsuri looks at it, teeth still set hard against each other in a grimace. He obviously has no idea what he’s looking at, other than that it’s a tiny, clearly bent piece of metal.

“It’s important to know how things work, you know. You really would have made such a terrible bureau chief, like this. How’d you even get that high in Division II? Nepotism?” 

Matsuri tosses the gun away. He’s glaring at the dark case at the ghost’s side. It notices, of course. 

“Oh, this?” It raises the case, waves it around, as it had with the gun, and the jammer. Like a tease. “This is your Christmas present! Do you really think I would have come all this way to see my dear nephew on the holidays without a gift?”

The case doesn’t pop open. Doesn’t reveal itself to be some kind of weapon - neither a quinque nor a bomb. The ghost laughs, again.

“Stop that.”

Of course, that only makes it laugh more. 

—

Matsuri did, in fact, work hard to make it into Division II. His family’s standards were never relaxed for him, only made harsher. The tests he had to pass were harder, and there were more of them. 

“If you want me to ever allow you to study in Germany,” His grandfather had said, firm and unmoving, not the barest hint of a smile on his face, “prove yourself.” 

They were alone in the big dining hall, the table empty save for a small bowl in front of Matsuri, who sat by himself. His grandfather would not even sit with him, not for this. Matsuri kept his expression a careful neutral. 

He made it five bites in before he reached under the table for a bucket and vomited. His grandfather did not approach, did not lay a hand on his back. He’d simply walked out of the room.

Later that day, the taste of bile and humiliation still lingering in his mouth no matter how many times he’d rinsed it, he saw his grandfather again, sitting with that brat and his mother on one of the many balconies. Grandfather was smiling, then, and his hands rested gentle on the lap of that woman and her son. They were laughing.

Matsuri spent the evening locked in the bathroom, a bowl of food he’d taken from the kitchen on the floor, determined to pass this latest test. He’d been getting better at it. Managed to keep the latest bite down for a while. It took all his focus, though, and when there’d been a soft knock at the door, his attention had slipped, just for a second, and he’d had to grab for the toilet bowl again. 

He’d locked the door. He’d been sure of that. Yet somehow it slid open, anyway. Always in places he shouldn’t be, that child. Matsuri had wiped his lip, stood on feet that were absolutely not shaky, and stared down at him. The boy was smiling. Always smiling. He held out a ceramic bottle in two hands. Matsuri could see the steam rising from it. 

“Get out.” His voice did not shake. That much, he had mastered a long time ago. The boy just stood there, offering the drink. Smiling. There was something else in one of his hands too, pressed tight to the side of the ceramic. When the kid didn’t move, didn’t do what he was ordered to, as usual, Matsuri grabbed it from his hands. It smelt pleasant enough, but the thought of drinking it sent his stomach twisting all over again. But he’d been practicing, and so he’d stayed standing. Still and tall, as he’d poured the hot liquid out directly on the brat’s head. The kid still hadn’t left. Still hadn’t stopped smiling. Matsuri had thought it was a pity the tea hadn’t been hot enough to scald a scar down the kid’s forehead. 

“Get. Out.” He’d said again. Harsher. Finally, the child listened. Bowed, mockingly polite, even picked up the bottle to take it with him when Matsuri had thrown it. And then, just as he’d closed the door, the child had the nerve to say, “Please get well soon.”

After he’d been left alone again, Matsuri found what the kid had been holding with the tea, lying on the floor. A small segment of a blister pack of anti-nausea medication. He’d taken it. Manage to get through the bowl of food and keep it down for almost an hour. 

There was no goodwill gained, of course, from the action, and any that could have been would have been lost the next day, when his grandfather had looked at him, disapproval lacing every feature, and said “If you cannot learn to be sick more quietly, you will go back to homeschooling.” A tattle-tale, on top of everything else.

—

“That’s rather rude, don’t you think?” the ghost in his living room says. “Such terrible hospitality. Didn’t your father teach you better manners than that?”

“Don’t you dare speak his name.” Matsuri knows, of course, this won’t have any effect, but he feels the need to say it anyway, apparently. 

“Aw, don’t be like that,” the ghost says, and Matsuri can tell it’s pouting, even if he can only somewhat see it. “It’s not like I’m the one who killed him. Really! I have an alibi!” And then it’s laughing. Again.

Rather than move towards it, this time, Matsuri turns, races in the other direction towards a storage closet next to the kitchen. He throws open the door, the automatic light turning on and illuminating a decidedly empty spot right where Matsuri’s gaze falls.

“It’s hardly proper to keep dead bodies in the pantry.” Rather than keep the distance, the ghost has floated closer, briefcase swinging back and forth in its hands. “Skeletons go in the closet. Bodies go in the freezer.” It speaks almost as if it’s reciting some kind of nursery rhyme. The closet light does not make the shade of its face seem any less corpselike. Matsuri is, just maybe, starting to wonder how literally to take this metaphor. 

“Bury the heart under the floorboards, and the head out in the yard.” Matsuri finds himself double-checking that its feet are actually on the floor. But then again, remember. Ghosts can be tricky. 

It continues the ghastly little song it’s making up. “Organs in a briefcase, organs in a sword. I stole mine from a great big tank, where did you get yours?” 

—

Matsuri’s father was nothing like his grandfather. Everyone said so. When he came to talk to Matsuri, his face was always kind. He’d sat down next to his son in the library with a sigh, rubbed at his own forehead. “He’s being too harsh on you. That’s probably my fault.” 

“It probably is.” Matsuri had said, trying to somehow stick his face further into the book. 

“When I was your age— ” His father started, leaning back in the old wooden chair.

“Stop. I’m studying.” Matsuri was quite good at German, already, but it didn’t help to have a conversation in Japanese at the same time as he was reading it.

His father reached over, forced the book down to the table. “You can study later. You know what always made me feel better?”

“I don’t care,” Matsuri said.

“Tennis.” 

“I hate tennis.”

“Basketball.”

“I hate basketball even more.”

“A hike it is, then!” His father had said, declarative and triumphant. Matsuri hated hikes, too. But, even if his father was nothing like his grandfather, he was still a commander in his own right. And Matsuri had had to learn, young, what that meant. Besides, the sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could get back to reading. 

He’d changed into less formal pants and put on the shirt his father had specifically bought for him last time he’d tried wearing his button-down up a mountain. Very begrudgingly, he found the backpack he’d gotten with it in the closet, and fished it out. Then he set it on the ground and just glared at it, as if he could make it burst into flames just like that. 

When he finally picked it up and turned around, that little brat was standing in his doorway, eyes wide. He purposefully ignored the kid and went to go find where he’d put those uncomfortable wool hiking socks. Of course, the child could not take a hint, and was still there, just on the other side of the doorframe, where he didn’t belong. Watching.

“What,” Matsuri finally snapped. 

The kid smiled wide. “Are you going somewhere?”

“No.” Why did his grandfather find this one intelligent, in the least.

That somehow only made the boy’s grin wider. His eyes were almost sparkling. “Are you playing dress-up?”

“I’m going for a walk,” Matsuri grumbled. “Why don’t you go for a long walk somewhere, too. Away from here.”

The little boy’s smile must have finally found its unreasonably wide limits because now he was gripping at the edges of his robe out of excess excitement. “One day, I will!” he said, beaming. “I’m going to climb to the top of Mount Fuji, and then to the top of Mount Everest, and then—”

“I don’t care.” Matsuri had said, and brushed right past him. He didn’t have time to entertain fantasy of any kind, much less those of a child whose fantasies would never amount to anything at all. 

He’d seen the boy again, as he reluctantly followed after his father, standing on one of the balconies. The child had stayed there at least until they’d passed the property line. For all Matsuri cared he could stand on that balcony until he caught a cold and died. 

—

Matsuri still does not get it, it seems.

“I also found the one in the office, you know,” The ghost says, “And all the ones in the library, so that’s also the wrong answer. Aren’t you going to ask what I got you for Christmas?” 

Matsuri doesn’t play along. He calculates, still until the last second, and then, just as the ghost’s back and forth rocking swings furthest to the left, he dashes, fast as he can, past it on the right.

“Woah!” it says, flailing its arms, the briefcase still tightly grasped in one of them. Matsuri does not see it stop, on a dime, and right itself, but he does here the “Just kidding!” as he dives into his own bedroom, clutching the signal jammer he swiped on the way. The victory is short-lived, though.

“Ooh, Matsuri-kun’s cell phone. Hmm, I wonder if I can— There, unlocked!”

Matsuri is scrambling, no doubt, for the last quinque hidden in this oversized penthouse apartment. The one in his own closet. It, too, is gone, of course. 

Unless the ghost is wrong about finding all of the ones in the library. He keeps quite a few in the library.

He can hear the ghost moving around the apartment. Not a ghost, not really. He brushed past it, and it’s solid enough. But what else do you call a creature, dead for years, face like a cadaver, appearing in your apartment on Christmas Eve?

You certainly couldn’t call it a ghoul. Not that that’s all together inaccurate. 

Ghost or not, this is, still, a ghost story.

“It’s too bad, Matsuri-kun,” Now that it started using his name, it seems to relish the chance to do so again. “If Matsuri-kun hadn’t been so keen to get such a big apartment with such thick walls and floors, maybe he could scream loud enough and one of the neighbors would call the police.”

The sound is, Matsuri must realize, moving towards the library, the only place there might still be a weapon. 

“How undignified, though, to have the police called on you for a family matter like this.” 

—

His father really had taken him hiking that day. It had been sweaty, and unpleasant, and his father had been way too pleased about the jerky he’d snuck into his own backpack as if there were any restrictions on what he could take. The water had been annoyingly lukewarm when he’d washed the salty food down, and the view was hardly worth it. 

It wasn’t the worst place his father took him, though.

I did tell you, didn’t I? Matsuri’s childhood was not an easy one. I did mention — his family had many bizarre traditions. And well, one day, Matsuri was meant to take over the family business.

His father’s hand was firm on his back as they walked. The women all stood in their doorways, some just in front, some just behind, others leaning up against the side. Some called to his father as the two passed, others averted their gaze. One woman, hair white, looking like she might fall if she stood a few inches away from the doorposts, was ushering children further inside. There was music playing, softly, from some room or another, and distantly the sound of wooden swords clacking together. 

He hardly had the time to mind seeing that brat here, too. At least he was where he was supposed to be, now. 

Matsuri couldn’t get on a plane to Germany fast enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I got any of this done by Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night, I guess. Chapters 1 and 2 were written together so the promised body horror is already up


	2. A Ghost Story: Present

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's got some body horror.

By the time Matsuri makes his move and bursts into the library, the ghost is already inside. The room smells heavily of incense and there’s still a faint haze of smoke, barely detectable in the dark. The ghost stands in front of the ornate cabinet that holds the shrine, briefcase in one hand. In his other is a sword. Long and sharp and very familiar. It wasn’t wrong - the ghost had found all the quinques in the library. It never said it took them all out.

“This is one of the oldest, isn’t it?” The ghost holds the sword out, pointed towards the ground. It looks down the edge of the blade. “How long do you think it’s been, since this one’s been fed?”

The ghost’s tone is different, in this room. Its whole form seems distorted. Even the way it moves seems strange. Unnatural. It puts the briefcase down, with a faint thump, between itself and the wall, and lifts a gloved hand up to touch the edge of the shrine.

Matsuri tenses, like he might move, or speak, but then the ghost tilts the sword up, ever so slightly, and the blade catches the glint of light from the moon in the window, and it’s just enough for Matsuri to realize why the figure looks so different.

The oversized coat it’d been wearing, that Matsuri had been used to it wearing, had been discarded, somewhere. And now that he’s looking, Matsuri no doubt can see it clearly, even in the dim light. He has the eyes of a ghoul, after all.

Its top is traditional. Loose and white, and wrapped right over left. It’s not closed well, either — just hangs open, exposing more of that pallid, corpse skin. Half of its chest is taken up by a gnarled old scar, like someone had shoved something in there, or taken it out. But that’s hardly what catches the eye. It’s not, Matsuri is sure— anyone would be sure— a human’s torso, even a ghoul’s. There are shapes carved into the clavicle and down towards the rib cage, like the edge of a river carved out of sediment, or something long since eaten into peculiar patterns by the waves. Ridges and valleys and pits, marked with a darker black than the room. Black veins branching like tributaries, sometimes knotting together into a strange shape that almost looks raised and open. Like a sore. Or an eye.

“Go on, go on,” the apparition— the wraith— says, voice floating like the haze of the smoke still drifting in the room, “turn on the light.”

Matsuri doesn’t move. 

So the ghost does, instead, walks towards the switch on the wall, letting the tip of the old sword glide along the floor. 

Perhaps Matsuri is thinking that if the ghost vanishes, right now, the scratch it’s leaving in the library floor would be all that’s left to prove any of this even happened. That, and the bent piece of metal from inside the gun still in the living room. 

But this is a ghost story, so both of those could disappear just as easily.

Matsuri earned his rank, once upon a time, on careful calculation and planning. On forethought and logic, not quick decisions or brute strength. But he _had_ been on the front lines, the same ones he’d sent wave after wave to die in later. 

And besides, he’s still angry. That anger had little point, before tonight, that boy— that man— long dead. Name a curse to the world, all co-conspirators scattered or back under the boot where they belong.

But the ghost came back, and so the anger must come back with it. That’s why this is a ghost story.

Matsuri moves with purpose. Goes not for the sword, not at first, but for the briefcase, still sitting next to the shrine. He uses that in lieu of a proper weapon to hit the sword, close to the hilt. It is a family heirloom, but better to break it than see it in those hands. He is the last of them, the last that could claim that name, and though he may have discarded it, there is no way he’s discarded the pride he’s always carried in it. The pride that held his head high, carried him through everything. Through all of it.

The sword falls out of the ghost’s grip. Almost too easily. Matsuri takes it up by the hilt. Washuu Yoshiu’s blade. He holds it firm, doesn’t hesitate. Hatred flows truer than love ever did. He lands the hit, right through the stomach just as the light flicks on.

The ghost, fully illuminated now, looks down at its stomach, where its own grandfather’s blade is buried near a quarter of a meter in. If Matsuri is hoping that the light will reveal all of this to be an elaborate trick, some kind of costume worthy of the clowns the dead thing called allies, he must be sorely disappointed. Maybe even scared.

Something thick and dark drips onto the blade, runs down it to join the similar substance seeping out around the edge of the wound. The ghost looks up, then, at Matsuri directly. 

It smiles. Its gums, its tongue, even its teeth are stained as black as if they belong to some old noblewoman. Black against an almost blue-white skin. In the light, Matsuri can see the dark veins that run underneath its face until they vanish into markings in the bruises under its eye. It tilts its head off to the side, horrible grin still wide, until its hair falls away from the other half of its face, revealing jagged black, like scars, down the cheek. They’re broken only by what must be— must have been— its other eye.

It would have been reasonable to be frozen, at the sight, but that’s not why the blade has stopped, why Matsuri doesn’t continue, rend the creature clean in two. He pulls at the hilt, tries to pull it up, and then when that fails, out the way it had come. It doesn’t budge.

“Ah,” the ghost says, another drop of black dripping from its lips as it does. And then it reaches down, runs its gloved hands up the edges of the ancient quinque steel. Above the edge of the gloves, crisscrosses of black and red meet more lines of black running down its arms. Matsuri tries and fails, once again, to pull the blade back, even as those gloves reach around, to the sharp edge of it and grasp it. And then, with a crack and a snap, one of the oldest quinques left in existence breaks. Part stays in the hand of its last true heir, and part lost in the stomach of its dead bastard son and executioner. 

How symbolic. 

The ghost holds its gloved hands up, studies them under the light before sliding the mostly cut through fabric off a few of its fingers. Only they aren’t fingers, not really. Shaped like fingers, but only approximations, formed entirely out of kagune. One of them has been sliced almost through, and it knits itself back together as Matsuri watches on. The creature in front of him laughs again, as if it finds this amusing. Only this time, it’s more of a gurgle. It reaches the appendage up to its lips and wipes at the liquid gathering there, smears some of it across its skin. But there’s less of it, once the hand comes to rest on the plane of its stomach. 

Matsuri’s hesitation is entirely practical, or so he’ll probably tell himself. If he attacks again, only to lose what he has left of the blade, it’s hardly good strategy. So for now he watches, braces for whatever reprisal, runs through everything he knows that might help him understand just what he’s looking at.

Washuu Matsuri, once known for cold logic and playing every battle like a game of numbers, is hardly fit to be the protagonist of a ghost story. 

The ghost traces the edges of the blade sticking out of its flesh gently. Almost fondly. Maybe Matsuri has noticed, by now, that none of whatever that is, (certainly it can’t be blood, as black as it is), has dripped onto the floor. It’s all just staying there, viscous, around the edges of the cut. He certainly notices, though, as it starts to flow up, along the edges of the steel, against all sense for physics. He must notice, as the kagune-formed fingers push from one end, and the black ooze almost reaches up to meet it. Bit by bit, millimeter by millimeter, until the blade has completely vanished and all that’s left is that tar — like sludge from the bottom of the ocean — weaving itself back together. Until there’s nothing left but a new branching black root in the middle, reaching out to join the rest of the tangled paths.

The ghost reaches up its hand, then, and Matsuri braces, ready to dodge whatever is coming. But it only points, motions to the briefcase still on the floor.

“Aren’t you going to open it? Your Christmas present.” Its voice sounds different than it did moments ago, before the attack. Strained, almost. The useless calculations turn over and over in Matsuri’s head. He doesn’t move.

“At least,” The ghost’s voice hitches, only for a split second, and then resumes, “put the sword down. You look silly.”

Matsuri does not want to. He does anyway. It’s just that he’s run out of scenarios where it could be of much use. Something tells him, correctly this time, entirely by chance, that even going in through the eyes wouldn’t do it. It turns its head back towards the cabinet and the shrine within.

“This is the same one, isn’t it? Sized down, but made from the pieces.” Its laugh is now down to a single, stiff huff. “Fitting.” It takes a rigid step back towards where it’s looking. “Whoever you took it to did a very good job. I recognized it immediately.”

“You shouldn’t have.” Right now, Matsuri has no other choice, he thinks, but to talk.

“Hm? But wasn’t that the point?”

“It was,” Matsuri says, sharp and exact. “But you should never have known the original.”

“Ah,” says the ghost. “I see.” It takes another step. Then pauses, and looks off to the side at Masturi. “Do you think I’m going to destroy it?”

It feels like a trick question. If Matsuri read more fiction, growing up, he might have known that there is usually a right answer to a trick question. A solution, if you know how to read the riddle. But he really never was one for fantasy, so he says nothing.

“I wasn’t going to,” the ghost says, even as he reaches up and touches the side of the wooden frame. “But if you want me to, I will.”

Matsuri finds that he nearly snarls his next words, that he has to pull them back into the tone he once worked so hard to perfect, the commander he was raised to be. “Step back. Now.”

The figure doesn’t seem affected by the performance, though it obeys, leaning against the far wall, instead. “Are you going to tell me to get out, next?”

And, when Matsuri says nothing to that, “To go back to where I came from? Where I belong?” 

“Go to hell.”

The ghost smiles again, this time only a thin crescent of the black of its teeth showing. “There we are, now we’re on the same page.”

Rather than appreciate all the clever double meanings there, Matsuri continues to try to strategize his way out. Maybe he’s finally learned that when he tries to reach outside the velvet-trimmed wheelhouse he’s so proud of, every time he’d acted on emotion rather than cold hard logic, he failed. Sometimes spectacularly. It would be like him, to learn the wrong lessons. It would be like him to miss the jokes.

“Maybe you should open my present,” the ghost says, again. “You never know, maybe it’s the quinque you’ve been looking for this whole time.”

Matsuri doesn’t move. Just stares at it, sitting between them on the floor. “Why would you bring me a quinque.”

The ghost shrugs its shoulders. Matsuri can’t help but look at the ways the landscape scarred into its torso moves, as it does. Grotesque. “Maybe I just thought it would be funny,” it says. “I mean,” It swivels a hand around at the wrist, “all of this is kind of the perfect setup, for that joke.”

“Your jokes have never been funny.” Matsuri bites back. The ghost looks almost surprised, by how fast that reply comes. Looks almost wounded by the sentiment. The ghost of a clown is still a clown, after all. 

“Yeah, well, if someone like you found them amusing, they’d have to be pretty terrible jokes.” It’s almost a conversation. It’s almost banter. It’s not, though, and never could have been. It whines, then, not the whine of a specter from beyond the grave, but like a petulant child. “Just open it. It won’t hurt you. And you’ll like it, I promise.”

Matsuri seems to have found his own, or a little bit of it, now. Conversations, office politics, and negotiation, were a little closer to where he was comfortable. Still his father’s expertise, more than his own. But maybe the memory of his dear father spurs him on to continue. “Why would I ever believe a promise from you.”

The ghost laughs at that. Laughs again. But shorter, softer, like it can’t muster up the obnoxious cackles from before. Matsuri probably reads that as an opening. “That’s a very good point,” the ghost says. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to take me at my word. But then, you’ve always been pretty stupid.” 

Matsuri just narrows his eyes. Doesn’t dignify that with a response. If you squint, he might almost look like his old self, the level of disdain and affront on his face as he glares over his glasses. 

The ghost sighs. It fills the room, even more, with a faint rotten metallic smell, now that the incense has burnt all the way down. “Fine, then. I’ll open it for you.” And then, quietly, it grumbles, “even if that kind of ruins it.” It motions with its finger-shaped kagune sticking out of the glove. “Slide it over.”

Matsuri doesn’t move. He is, no doubt, trying to come up with every possible way any possible move could be a trap. After all, the ghost has been here a while, already been through his whole apartment, planning. 

“If you want me to get closer so badly,” the ghost breaks through his thoughts, inpatient. Matsuri runs the numbers. Calculates the odds. Then he reaches out and carefully, carefully, slides the briefcase towards himself. He eyes it with an equal mix of potent hatred and sharp suspicion.

It’s identical to the briefcases used for most quinques in almost every way. The leather, the finish, the fastenings. The only difference is that in place of the complex mechanism that usually sits just at the top, the locks and verifications and activations, there are just two simple latches. 

He looks up. The ghost is watching him, expectant. Smiling. Always smiling. He has the time, now, to run the numbers through his head again. He’ll keep trying to do this, over and over, despite the fact that there are far too many unknown variables here. 

A ghost is nothing, if not an unknown. 

He does not open the latches. 

The ghost whines again. “Fine, fine. I’ll just tell you what it is, if you’re going to be like that.”

Matsuri says nothing.

“At least ask me. Please?” It’s quite the contrast, now that its coat is missing, now that the light is on and there’s no way to mistake the creature for the man it’d been before. A dead thing, crawling up out of nightmares, pouting like a frustrated child.

Matsuri doesn’t ask. The ghost deflates, just a little, then stops, sharp and hard, halfway through the movement. Stands back up. “Fine. I got you a book.”

“A book.”

“A book!” The ghost’s face might have lit up at that. If it were alive. But it isn’t. “You always did love books.”

Even if it’s true, Matsuri is still sour that the ghost should know that. He slides the briefcase, slowly and methodically from side to side. Faintly, from within, there are small, telltale thuds as he does. The sort of sound a book or two might make, inside a briefcase. Almost as if the ghost is telling the truth. He touches the latches. Stops.

“I told you, if you don’t want to open it, I’ll just do it myself.” And then, like a switch, like someone had changed the channel to another program all together, the ghost continues completely differently. “Or I suppose I could torture you, until you open it.” 

Matsuri does not shake. He does not shiver. 

The ghost leans back against the wall. “I was thinking I could start doing impressions.”

“Impressions.” That is not what Matsuri was expecting. 

He keeps ignoring the fact that a ghost is always, always, an unknown. It doesn’t help, of course, that Matsuri still thinks he knows the man the ghost used to be. Thinks, that in all the hours he’d spent reviewing what had gone wrong, stewing in his memories and his anger, he’s come to understand the twisted thing that little brat had grown into. He should never have been allowed to grow that far at all. Matsuri still thinks that. These days, and especially tonight, he only feels more vindicated in thinking that.

The ghost raises an arm and points to the shrine again. Points to a specific portrait. “You’ve heard my impression of your father before, but I could always refresh your memory, if you want. I think it was quite—” before the ghost can say another word, Matsuri grabs at both latches and flips them open. Nearly yanks the briefcase lid off, lifting it.

The ghost wasn’t lying this time, either. Inside is a heavy book, clearly custom bound. The cover is a uniform matte black leather, broken only by two embossed characters. His family name. Washuu. 

His mind spins, almost visibly. A taunt? A mockery? Some kind of trap, hidden somehow inside the binding? But his hand is already on the cover. Already feeling the quality of the leather, the cut of the pages. He looks back up at the ghost, as if it will give him something more.

“Go on,” it says, its face a plain smiling mask.

Maybe he does it just to stop the threat of hearing his father’s voice again, out of that disgusting dead mouth. Maybe he does it as a sign of bravery, a sign of ownership of that name he’s long stopped using. Or maybe he just really likes books. 

He opens it and reads, silently, to himself. 

_“Contained within is the entire history of the Washuu Clan, as far as the author has been able to uncover. It contains within copies of original sources, as well as translations, where necessary. The work, though extensive, does not claim to be complete. This volume is, at the time of writing, the only one of its kind in existence. There are no plans to print anymore, nor any plans to update the information herein, from its author.”_

The name of the author is not anywhere to be found. Not on the cover, not in the forward. There is no dedication. Matsuri flips through the heavy, expensive-looking pages, watches hundreds of pages of kanji and high definition pictures of old papers flip past until he reaches the back, a detailed index and appendix. 

He scans it, looking for something. Specific names, maybe.

Then he closes the book and looks up at the ghost, that blank smile still on its face.

“Nimura.” 

The ghost tilts its head, ever so slightly. Its one visible eye seems to look around, at the floor, at the walls, out the window. Finally, it makes it back to Matsuri’s face. Then it speaks. Cold and empty. “Who?”

Matsuri doesn’t seem to know what to do with that. He lifts the book, holds it in both hands. He is, probably, unaware of the reactions warring with themselves on his face. Of the way his fingers seem to flex and unflex around the hard cover. The ghost he’s staring at does not give him any indications of any of it. It’s a ghost, after all, not a mirror. 

“I know it’s not traditional, here, to give family presents for Christmas,” the ghost says, instead. “But, well,” it stops. It looks around the room, again, like it’s looking for something there. Or seeing something Matsuri cannot. And then, as if there’d been no interruption, continues, “I figured you’d be busy for New Year’s.” 

Matsuri looks back at the book. Flips through it again. This time, he opens it to a page containing a scanned copy of old writing. He touches the writing, ever so gently, with the tips of his fingers. Then, finally, the expression on his face settles. Anger.

“You stole these,” he says, accusing. “When you— you stole—” that anger, as bright as it burns, is quick to give way to something else, something Matsuri, for all his practice, for all the late nights he’d applied himself, for all the careful crafting of his entire persona he’d done, could not contain. Emotion seeps out of him, out of the corner of his eyes, into the shaking of his hands, the trembling of his lips. There’s no need to guess, now, what’s going on in his head. The night he’d held his father’s corpse, coming back on the longest boat ride of his life, longer somehow than any of the cruises or meetings he’d had to take at sea for business. Being greeted by familiar walls stained red, a house ransacked in a massacre, only to be pulled away, even from that. His grandfather lying face down at his desk, swords sticking out of his back, a forged will under his old hands. 

The ghost gives him nothing — like it’s done pretending to be anything but a ghost. Blank. Smiling. Still smiling. It points to the open briefcase on the ground. Matsuri looks. There’s still something inside, smaller than the book he’s still gripping in his hands. A hard-drive. He can read the lettering on the side well enough. The size is staggering. 

“That’s everything,” the ghost says, hollowly. “Everything I had, anyway. And I know the accusation you’re making. But when was the first time you checked? Do you know what went missing when? Do you even know where everything was stored?”

The fact that Matsuri must know that the ghost is right does not stop the emotions boiling over. “How dare you,” he says, moves to charge, only to realize he’s still holding the book in his hands. He stops, stops mid outburst to put it down, nearly gentle, into the briefcase and latch the thing closed.

(It would have been pretty simple to rig something to destroy the contents as soon as it was closed a second time. It wouldn’t have been that hard to rig the book itself, as a trap, or a hard drive into a bomb. But the ghost really isn’t lying, in case you’re still wondering. The present is entirely straightforward. Exactly what it seems to be.)

Matsuri tries to lunge towards the ghost then, hardly the tactician all those humans and ghouls must have seen in their dying moments. The ghost moves as quickly as it had from the chair at the start of their encounter, any of the hesitation or restriction Matsuri thought he sensed gone. The figure is quite suddenly standing right next to the shrine again, and well outside Matsuri’s grasp. 

Matsuri expects a taunt, readies himself for it, tries to calculate through the tempest in his mind how to, somehow, destroy the intruder without marring his family’s ancient relics. But that’s not what he gets. The ghost moves again, before he does, towards the door of the library he left open when he came in. He charges after, free from the restraints of having to avoid the artifacts inside.

He rushes out, after the phantom, into his own living room. It takes seconds, at most, and somehow, he’s already lost sight of it. Only for a second. Then he sees it, back where it was just as he’d come in. Sitting on the chair facing the entranceway. 

Matsuri stands in front of it, the heat of fury not drying the tears at the corner of his eyes still, hands balled into fists.

The ghost leans its head on its hand, just as before. “Are you going to punch me?”

Matsuri realizes that he doesn’t know. He unclenches his fists. He’s a tactician, a commander. He’s a man who had earned in blood— not his own— his rank of special class at the head of Division II. He will not be defeated. Not by this man— this thing. Not again.

He goes directly for the throat.

This time, the ghost does not move. Stays perfectly still in the chair, the dead thing that it is, as Matsuri’s hands grip at its throat. It had been breathing heavily, earlier. Matsuri is sure of it. If it has to breathe, he can kill it, kill it for real, even if he has to choke it out with his bare hands. 

He squeezes, and squeezes, and squeezes. Stares through bloodshot eyes at the thing right in front of him. Their faces are intimately close. He grips as hard as he can. The ghost does not fight back now, either. Just gazes up at him, as the black veins under its skin pulse and darken. Even when that black leaks out into its eye, turning it jet black and bright red, it doesn’t struggle. Matsuri doesn’t try to figure out what is going through the ghost's mind, in that moment. He doesn’t even try to read the blank face in front of him. It doesn’t matter what a ghost is thinking. It’s a ghost story. It’s not about the ghost. 

Matsuri doesn’t let up until the veins stop pulsing, until the black drains out of the one visible sclera and its pallid eyelid slips closed. It was breathing. Matsuri was right. It was breathing, and now it’s not. Slowly, then, Matsuri lets his fingers relax. He’s done it. It’s over.

But I told you, didn’t I? Matsuri has always been kind of stupid. You can’t kill something that’s already dead. Not really. Not for good.

You can fill in the blank between the moment he steps away from the ghosts still and silent figure to the moment he turns around to see it, again, standing in the middle of the living room, however you want. Maybe it only takes a few seconds. Maybe it’s been minutes, or hours. Maybe Matsuri spent the time doing all the chores he’d been planning when he came home. Maybe he ran around his apartment again, only to find the phone and internet completely cut and his cellphone nowhere to be found. Maybe Matsuri just stands there, staring, and only makes the mistake of turning his back on it a few seconds before it rises back up. Maybe he even thinks about the tragic life of the boy whose ghost spent Christmas Eve haunting him. Probably not, though. But you’re free to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that it matters, to a ghost. Not that it matters what would matter to a ghost, anyway.

“I am,” the ghost says, words more strained than before, coming, as they are, through a broken trachea. “A little disappointed.”

Matsuri is just staring again, so the ghost continues.

“I deserve at least a thank you, don’t I?” It reaches a hand up to rub at its neck, where new strands of black are already twisted under the skin. “But I suppose that was…” It trails off. Closes its mouth. It moves its neck around, then its jaw. Something pops. It coughs, just once. 

And then it turns away, walking across the living room, grabbing the big oversized coat it’d been wearing from the old antique armchair. It moves not towards the front door, but towards the balcony. The whole time, Matsuri just watches. It slides the glass door open, letting the biting chill of the late December night into the well-heated apartment.

It doesn’t move for a while, then, like it’s waiting for something. A gust of wind twists through the space, strong enough to rattle something all the way in the kitchen. It’s the only thing moving, visible in the trees outside and the edges of the ghost’s loose-fitting top. The light of the moon dims and brightens, dims and brightens, as the gathering clouds pass. It stays there, framed by the door frame like a painting. The moon. The trees. A specter in flowing cloth.

Then the ghost takes a step forward, onto the balcony. Walks all the way to the very edge of it. Just in time to catch another rush of air in its hair and clothes, it throws its arms out, wide, and tilts its head up at the moon. The coat whips around in its one arm until the bulk of it breaks free and unfurls.

As the breeze dies again, the figure turns around. Faces back inside to where Matsuri stands.

“Last chance,” the ghost says, softly enough that its voice seems to be carried only on the wind. In the light of the moon, freshly risen from death, it looks more like a ghost than it had all evening.

Even a man who never read any ghost stories in his life should know what to do here. 

“For what,” Matsuri says. He sounds tired. Completely spent.

The ghost reaches forward, pointing directly at Matsuri across from him. “There really are no more quinques in the house. But you still have one thing you haven’t tried,” it says, as airy as the gathering storm. “That’s the punchline, to my joke.”

Even when Matsuri’s hands were around its neck, even lost to anger, to grief, to violence, Matsuri didn’t squeeze with everything he had. Not out of any old fondness for the little boy who shared a face with the ghost in front of him, not out of any pity, nor because the ghost's actions had in any way weakened him. No, even then, even staring into that one black and red eye, he did not break through the careful training his father and grandfather had given him. To hold back, entirely on instinct, inside the range of a normal human. 

“I’d like to have seen it,” the ghost says. “I’d like to see how similar they are.” Something rips, loud against the silence of the apartment, but no doubt lost in the background noise of Tokyo beyond. Black tendrils against the night sky. Simple, curling things, like a kitsune’s tails, flicking in the wind. 

“This,” the ghost says, “is the only thing I stole to make that present. The only thing I took from a place I had no right to take from.”

The kagune fan out behind the ghost on either side. The book, safe in Matsuri’s library, follows the path through dozens of countries, and countless legends of strange many-armed, many-tailed beings. Demons and gods. There is a small statue, stored in the rebuilt _butsudan_ in the library, from the plateau of Tibet. Still petrified and coiled deep below the city, the Nagaraja finds its namesake in the Hindu texts of India. And, of course, there is the brand Matsuri carries, despite his stubborn refusal to use it. The name _ghoul_ , which traveled the same routes as his ancestors from Arabia. 

Matsuri will still not use that power — cultivated slaughter by slaughter across an entire continent, perpetuated across unwilling generations. For all he clings to a name, a history, a smattering of antiques, he is not the one, here, that embodies the monstrous legacy of that bloodline. Perhaps, like the shrine, like the old sword, Matsuri will hold selfishly onto that family heirloom until he dies, locked away inside whatever house he’s found himself in. 

It’s a different old thing he reaches for, instead, deep from within his guts. 

“Get. Out.” He almost sounds like a real commander when he says it, rather than a grumpy teenage boy. Almost.

The kagune dissipate, as if those words were truly a magic spell. They break into a fine mist that the wind quickly spreads out across the city. 

“I see,” the ghost says, pulling the large coat around its frame. Once again, from inside the apartment, in the dim light, you could pretend it isn’t a ghost at all, just a distant and disliked relative, lingering too late on Christmas Eve.

“How nostalgic.”

The ghost smiles, like it has always smiled. It tips itself backwards, falling over the railing at the edge of the balcony, and vanishes.

And, because this is a ghost story, that is where the story ends.

Matsuri’s heart will not grow three sizes that night. He will not throw open his window and tell a young boy to buy his family the fattest goose he can find. He closes the window, instead, slides the door to the balcony shut, and locks it. Tiny Tim is dead already, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone has a lovely holiday, whatever festive time of year this little ghost story found you in. There is more planned, despite how the chapter ends, but I have no idea if it'll be up in a few days, or new years, or later. I only write when a ghost possesses me, so you'll have to bring it up with the other side. 
> 
> I'm leaving it as 2/3 for now, but it's possible what's left will also be split into multiple chapters. Depends how long it gets.


	3. Little Drummer Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story's already over. What's the point in following a ghost?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part focuses more on the Garden. Nothing all that graphic in this chapter, but heavy implications. Also, the tags and warnings from before largely apply to this as well.
> 
> The alternate (and original) title of this chapter is "The Story of A Ghost".

I told you, didn’t I? The story ends when the ghost vanishes. The story isn’t about the ghost, just the haunting. If you keep going, it won’t be a ghost story anymore, not really. If you look too close, you’ll spoil the magic of it, for sure.

Well, you’ve been warned.

This is no longer a ghost story. This is now the story of a ghost.

It— the ghost— he— doesn’t actually vanish. He simply pulls himself out of view, using the night and the gathering clouds as a cover. The thin, branching line he throws out to pull it off is as black as the sky and the pavement below anyway. It’s a simple magic trick. There is no more real magic here, just the kind performed on the stage. And he’s a little rusty, in terms of being onstage.

He lands messily, the bones in one of his ankles rolling and popping out just enough that he ends up decidedly not on his feet. It doesn’t hurt though, not really. Not compared to the searing pain in his gut. He’d say it felt like knives stabbing into him every time he breathes, but well, that’s close enough to what’s actually happening that it’s hardly much of a simile. Still, he can’t help himself as his shallow breaths turn to shallow laughter, muffled up against the palm of his gloves. It hurts. It hurts a lot. And that’s funny, because he can still, somehow feel it. 

He hugs the sides of buildings, for support and for the shadows they offer. There aren’t many places to hide, in fancy upscale neighborhoods like this, but even rich people need sewers, and sewers have access tunnels. There’s one in the small park, not too far from the building. The lights around it are off, this late at night, and by now, the moon has been completely covered over by clouds. It’s going to either rain or snow, depending on exactly how cold this chill actually is. He’s sure the old oversized coat must be helping, but it’s hard to tell. He’s pretty sure anything would feel cold, against the burning deep in his torso. He’s pretty sure anyone gets cold, when they’re bleeding internally. 

There’s a small excuse for a playground in the tiny green space (well, these days, it’s all brown and grey). It’s not actually there for any kind of symbolism or neat bookends - it’s not like he’d had a place like this growing up, anyway. It’s just there for the kids who live in the neighborhood. Normal, everyday kids. Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean they’re happy. It doesn’t mean they’re lucky. Doesn’t even mean they’re safe. Statistically, within a few kilometers of where the ghost collapses against the wall, insides seizing, cutting themselves even further to pieces, there are children wide awake in their beds on Christmas Eve, terrified their door might open before morning. There are children with bruises and scars that will never heal. Even in a neighborhood like this. His story isn’t all that unique. 

Very few ghosts’ stories are. Nothing worth thinking about more closely. Maybe that’s why they aren’t usually told. Because if you stopped to tell the story of every single ghost, you’d be forced to wonder just how many there are. How it’s possible that the streets aren’t choked with them. 

Maybe, they are.

He manages to limp just behind a shed at the edge of the park before he doubles over, coughing on something thick in his throat. He gags, spits black onto the black ground, and gags again. When nothing more happens, he leans, shaking, against the shed and takes a few more shallow breaths.

Did you know, you don’t have the same kind of nerve connections in your guts as you do in your muscles or bones or soft tissue? You can’t feel what’s going on in there, not the same way you can when steel goes through your skin. It’s more generalized, just sickening agony, a radiating ache, and sensation of things twisting as they’re sliced apart only to grow back together over and over and over. There is a surprisingly large amount of space in the maze of a person’s insides for shrapnel to get lost, even when the corridors of it aren’t constantly rearranging themselves. Which, in his case, they are. The blueprints coiled inside his DNA have long since been neglected in favor of some surrealist remembrance of how organs are meant to be structured. It doesn’t feel that poetic, though. Certainly not anymore. 

His body shudders again. Once, twice. He stares up at the barely visible halo the moon makes beyond the clouds and sticks the kagune fingers of his one hand down his throat.

He vomits out muck and sediment, thick and disgusting onto the ground just as the first drops fall from the sky. Not snow, but not quite rain either. He wonders if it will manage to wash all this away before Christmas morning. It’s hardly a romantic sight. 

Once he’s steady enough to do it without falling over, he reaches down, into the middle of the mess and picks up a small piece of metal. Wipes what he can’t flick off of it against the side of his coat. He holds it up, towards the nearest street lamp. It’s not the whole end of the blade, and there are undoubtedly more fragments of it still ripping him apart inside. Still, this much is sizable. 

Such sloppy work, grandpa. Early quinques, he knows, were rough forged like this, entire chunks that were all hard steel, not enough RC cells embedded through it for even this body of his to break apart. But he’d known all that before Matsuri had opened his door, too. 

It’s not that this, exactly, was the plan. It’s not that he had a single plan, step by step. He hadn’t needed one. Matsuri was predictable enough. Besides, he’s retired. He doesn’t write scripts anymore, not like that. He’s learned his lesson. And he's never been afforded multiple failures before he learns his lesson. Not even when he was a child.

Ah, shit.

You really want to know? The ghost’s side of the story? Are you sure? it’s not a particularly funny one. And what good is it, telling a story, if it won’t make anyone laugh?

So, if you really want to know, really want to know the story of this particular ghost, you have to promise. Promise you’ll laugh.

—

It wasn’t like he and his mother spent all their time up there, in the main house. He couldn’t tell you the exact breakdown of it. Maybe he’d worked it out, back then, just what percentage of the time he spent where, or maybe he didn’t. It wasn’t like it would’ve helped him predict when he’d spend the day, sitting on a grand balcony, showing off his latest trick for that old man, and which days he’d be chasing Rize through flowers, waiting for her to slow down so he could catch her. But it did seem like something he might have done, just to play with the numbers. He couldn’t tell you if that was nature or nurture, the tendency he’d had since he was little to try to figure things out, break things down into models and charts and systems. Maybe it’s just what happened, in a life like that. 

But if he ever did figure out the percents for it, he’s long since forgotten. That was a different lifetime, you know? It might as well have happened to someone else.

Either way, it’s not exactly surprising, that he’d been down in the garden the day Yoshitoki took Matsuri to walk among the buildings. He’d been coming back from practice when he spotted them. They were, naturally, impossible to miss. The entire place, exactly as it was designed to, moved and bent around them. A few of the younger children who hadn’t yet understood still ran around, almost freely, but everyone was quick to pull them back in. If they couldn’t learn that lesson fast, there really was no hope for them. Not that there was much to be had, either way, but it never does take much. 

Hope is like that. It’ll grow even in the most inhospitable places— sickly and malformed— but it will still grow. Like a particularly pernicious weed.

They were moving towards the practice area, as they walked, so he’d been able to see the look clear on both of their faces. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were talking about. There were only so many reasons they’d be down here. He’d smiled at Matsuri, then, as he always did, but for once, Matsuri didn’t glare back at him. His expression was too busy contorting itself into other knots.

Yoshitoki gestured, half pointing, half waving, towards one of the doors. The woman who stood in that one stood out, dressed in _hanfu_ rather than the kimonos of the women around her. She smiled, practiced and pretty, and waved back. Yoshitoki turned to Matsuri and said something the ears of a mere half-human couldn’t hear, from that far away, but he could see the way Matsuri had been unable to stop the wrinkling of his nose. Yoshitoki laughed, and waved at the woman again. In any other context, it might’ve been read as apologetic. 

As a child, he’d always thought of Matsuri as incredibly disobedient. Sometimes, he’d pressed himself up against the door to the library, just to listen to the way he’d argue with his father or one of the senior servants. It was always more fun, when it was Yoshitoki, because the servants always gave in, much too fast. Maybe, when he was much younger, that was part of why he’d kept seeking the older boy out. 

Yoshitoki kept talking, and the more he did, the more doorways he pointed out, the less Matsuri seemed to be listening. Maybe the disobedient boy was merely trying to look anywhere his father was not. Maybe that’s why, as they walked, Matsuri’s gaze was drawn, instead, to the children coming back from practice. 

(That’s what they’d called it, then, just ‘practice,’ but it’s a strange thing to call teaching children to kill and judging their aptitude for it, isn’t it? On the other hand, it wasn’t all that different from the Kendo they teach to boys and girls who will never once see the life drain out of another person’s eyes. And they call that practice, he’s pretty sure.)

The group he’d found himself with that day were mostly older boys. His mother had been very proud of him, for that, how quickly he’d worked his way into these higher-level groups. He still hadn’t really understood yet, why she’d started telling him to try harder at it, but it made her happy.

Matsuri eventually gave up all the barest pretense of paying attention. Nimura had kept trying to catch his eyes again, like a little game, but he wasn’t where Matsuri had been looking. 

Anywhere else, there wouldn’t be anything grotesque about it, not really. Some of the other boys were about Matsuri’s age, just a year or two younger, and there was nothing untoward about a boy at that age starting to look at other boys a little differently, a little more like his father looks over the women in their pretty robes. But it’s not a look Nimura could have mistaken for anything else. He’d seen it too many times. He could see it there, too, on Yoshitoki’s face, just for a second, as he watched two of the women talking. 

Getting placed with those older boys hadn’t been that hard. The trick was to watch everyone else when they had their turns. Their teachers were prone to becoming rote and repetitive, and most of the kids chose the same angles of attack. So really, once he figured out how to get around those, he started winning most of his matches. It was all about being able to know what your opponent was thinking. You just had to know what to expect. Once you had a system for it, once you knew what to watch for, it wasn’t difficult at all.

He watched Matsuri watching the older boys. He watched Yoshitoki watching the women. And he’d thought— they really could look so similar, couldn’t they? All three generations of that house.

—

He doesn’t regret it, the little sleight of hand he’d pulled with the sword. Well, hand and stomach. The bait was obvious, though if Matsuri hadn’t bitten, he’d have found some other trick to perform. There wasn’t any shortage of improvisation prompts, in that room. It hardly had to be that quinque. 

Besides, why would he waste regrets on something like that? If he starts dwelling on all the jokes that didn’t land exactly right, by the time he makes it halfway to the events of this evening, the quinque would have rusted through on its own on Matsuri’s wall. Or whoever took it after him.

If you’re wondering, about the conceit, that’s as much a ghost of Christmas future as there is to tell. Matsuri will die, one day, as everyone does, and Nimura doesn’t have much interest in being the one to do it. There just isn’t a point, and it’s funnier to watch him rot away. To watch the last vestiges of the name “Washuu” die under a fake identity, all alone. But it isn’t like telling Matsuri that such was his fate would have changed anything.

That’s a pretty cynical thought, though, isn’t it? Especially for Christmas.

From the side of the shed, he can see holiday lights strung up through the bare branches of nearby trees. There are traditional new year’s decorations in some of the nearby windows, and, if he listens for it, drunken festive cheer of some kind or another not too far off. There is also a twisted mass of flesh and death still resting around rubble in parts of this city, even now. He’d thought, once, that might have made a difference. But it turns out the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t see it, how deeply the rot had metastasized. Bringing the tumor to the surface did nothing but give them more to ignore. More to drink and forget. 

The thing is, no one is born a cynic. Not even in a place like that.

—

His mother had taught him to read. It was expected, generally, but most didn’t take to it like his mother had. He used to think she’d just loved reading, loved poetry and language and all the different ways to say each different character. She had what felt like endless books of poems, verses and verses about the natural world, storms and oceans and mountains that touched the sky. From as far back as he can remember, she’d read those poems to him, then showed him a character. 

“That one means mountain—” and she’d take his hand in hers and trace it into the air. And later, hold his little hand around the bamboo brush and guide it onto the practice paper, reciting poems as she moved their hands together through the order of the strokes. “And you can read it like—“

He didn’t understand most of the words, old and archaic, and he didn’t understand the images they were trying to invoke, but he loved the way her voice sounded, the rhythm of the syllables, the musicality of it. He filled in the blanks, in his imagination, took the ideas he understood and crafted landscapes full of all sorts of fantastical trees and towering waterfalls and the ocean — an endless pond that went on forever and ever and ever, constantly stirred and churned as if there were giant creatures somewhere you couldn’t see splashing about. 

Sometimes, there were pictures in the books, too. Flowing inky lines and woodcuts, and he’d always wanted to see the ones that showed flowers. Not because he liked flowers, though at the time, he probably would have told anyone he did. But some of the flowers were ones he’d seen before, seen for real, so, he figured, that was the best way to understand what Mt. Fuji really would look like, not in prints, and not flat and small and grainy like it always looked on film. 

“One day,” he’d said, “we’ll climb all the way up to the top, together.” He’d been trying to explain it to Rize. “And when we’re at the top, we’ll be able to see everything.”

He doesn’t think she believed him, about Mt. Fuji. Not about his promise to take her, one day, but that it really was as big and as beautiful as the poems made it out to be. His mother told him it was, though. That she’d seen it, once, and it was prettier than any picture. Rize was so young then, they both were, and their world had been so small, anything that big was hard to really conceptualize. But he still tried, dug up a small mound of dirt and picked little bits of plants for the scale of the trees. He’d tried to make little paper people, but there was no way to make them small enough, with the size of his little model, and even an attentive child would get bored of watching someone else play with dirt.

It was, he had to admit, more fun to try to throw it around. Rize had been right about that.

—

He gives the dirt in front of him a few pathetic kicks, just to disguise the mess, before the precipitation starts to pick up in earnest. Not enough to be a problem, in terms of access tunnels, but enough that standing in it, his hair and coat are quick becoming wet. The ends of his hair are already starting to freeze over, scraping against his skin in stiff little lashes when the wind blows by. He really should just make a run for it, get a solid layer of concrete between him and the weather.

He doesn’t, though, maybe because of the lingering stiffness in his ankle, or the sour twist of nausea, or the pain. But It seems silly, after all this time, to be deferring something as simple as pain, so maybe that isn’t it. Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe he just wants to feel the biting chill. 

The temperature underground doesn’t change all that much, even when it’s connected by spillways and pipes and basements. The layers of earth temper both the heat and the cold, and if you go far enough, the only thing that matters is how close you are to the magma of the core. Far enough away from the sun, and it starts to get warm again all on its own. No one ever really digs that far, though, not unless they’re trying to rip something out from the guts of the planet. Even then, it’s rare to go that deep. Almost everything people have ever built, every subway and sewer, stays within the first kilometer of the earth’s crust. 

It’s no wonder humanity is so shallow.

Maybe he just wants to see if it will snow. A white Christmas. How wonderful.

He goes for a compromise, away from the sleet. The slide has a little covered section at the top. Before he pulls himself up, he studies the thing. It probably was designed to resemble some kind of animal, a long time ago, but he couldn’t tell you which. He doesn’t know why there’s a covered section either. Maybe it’s to give the kids a little shade as they wait their turn. Or maybe it’s there for exactly this, hiding from the rain. He wouldn’t know. He’s not in the business of designing playgrounds. (You could say he’d dabbled in it, once. His record is rather abysmal.)

The ladder is metal and freezing to the touch, so much so that the one intact glove he has sticks to the rungs. He has to pull it free. The kagune fingers on the other hand come away with ease, leaving little melted marks in the ice. 

He can sit well enough in the alcove, his back pressed up against one side of it and bent knees the other. He slips his gloves off and lays his hands out against the lap of his jacket. They’re quite the pair, the near black of gnarled kagune and the chalky white of his other fingers. He touches the tips of them together. Plays a little compare and contrast on the muted sensations coming from each. If Matsuri could see just how pale they’d become in the cold, he’d probably have thought himself rather silly for thinking the rest of his house guest looked like a corpse. 

You wanted to hear the story of a ghost? Here’s one for you. The deepest mine in the world goes down four kilometers below the earth. The operation is so large and complex, it’s become its own city, full of branching tunnels and taut wire and metal. They lower workers in, every day, on steel contraptions and keep them alive by pumping a slurry of ice and salt down over massive fans. It’s hellish, even then, rocks hot enough to blister skin. 

But there are also ghosts in these mines. People with complexions like ash who hide out in the tunnels that have already been stripped bare for months on end. Ghost miners, they’re called, people society has no other place for, poisoning themselves with toxic chemicals and lack of sunlight just to steal a little of what’s buried in the rock.

What could drive such an operation? A vein of gold less than eighty centimeters wide. There’s no real reason for it, for the tonnes and tonnes of iron and machinery, for the thousands of broken human bodies and spirits. There is hundreds of times more gold already locked in bank vaults than could ever be needed for anything practical. No, these ghosts were created entirely by the mass delusion in the value of bullion and a long bet placed against the stability of everything else. 

Hundreds of ghosts living underground, birthed out of the insatiable appetite to hoard some solid assurance of power. 

See? There really is nothing unique about the story of this particular ghost.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mponeng gold mine is a real place - that section is taken mostly from interviews Matthew Hart gave about his book "Gold."
> 
> Would you look at that? I did say it might be New Year's, didn't I? This somehow isn't the end, either, and more is already written, but I wanted to be cheeky and get something out for New Year's, like I did for Christmas. No idea if it'll really only be one additional chapter or if I'll just keep inching the count up.
> 
> Don't worry, the rest will hurt more.
> 
> Also, I changed the title of this chapter later, because I had an idea.


	4. Silent Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A ghost spends an entire chapter sitting on top of a playground slide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the warnings, including the added ones, but remember the old ones still apply. They very much apply. Nimura, as usual, speaks highly of dying, and sometimes you just aren't in the headspace to read that. Or about the stuff that goes on inside the Washuu house. Please take care of yourself.
> 
> I reserve the right to change these headcanons around for future fics if I ever write anything more, but there are so many fun versions of pain, why pick just one.
> 
> The alternate title for this chapter is "How the Winds are Laughing".

A ghosts sits alone, curled up at the top of a playground slide in the early hours of Christmas morning. He  studies the line just at the base of his fingers where all the color left in this body of his fades out. He flexes each of them, the muscles, joints, and tendons, digit by digit, and runs his other hand along the top of his palm. A temporary constriction in the arteries, often from the cold. Harmless enough, just annoying. He’d long since gotten used to it. Nothing he couldn’t hide with a pair of gloves. He had plenty of reasons to wear them, anyway. 

Even more now. He should put them back on. He doesn’t.

He tightens and relaxes each of the muscles in his hand. Presses it into the fabric of his jacket. Focuses on signals traveling up his nerves, through the pathways of his spine and into his sensory cortex until little lines of black reach up his palm and break through into the white of his fingers. Color floods in behind them, blues and purples that pulse and ache against his skin.

These two hands of his, one just an approximation made of kagune, the other somehow still flesh and blood and flooded and thrumming with all the shades of life and death. It’s not as simple as one being human and the other unmistakably a ghoul’s, as nice and neat as that symbolism might be. One eye or one hand of a ghoul, the other of a human. A tidy little half and half. Solidly thematic. But here’s a secret, about symbolism like that. It’s often lying.

—

He’d gotten quite good at moving through that house unnoticed. This area was a little tricky, near where the servants stayed, because there always seemed to be someone around. He knew the perfect spot to stand in the hallway outside, so that they wouldn’t notice if they opened the door, so long as they weren’t already looking for him. But that was the easy part, hiding and waiting for the coast to be clear. The next part was tricky. Most things in this closet were well out of the reach of a child’s arms, so he’d had to figure out which shelves were stable and quiet enough for him to climb on, and how best to grip the wood with the toes of his socks. There’d been a lot of trial and error, a lot of clapping his hand over his mouth and hoping no one heard him fall down. Some of the medicine and bandages were too high up for him to get a good enough look at without grabbing blindly and sorting through them on the closet floor. At least he was small and could sit comfortably in here with the door closed when he needed to.

He knew where the stomach medicine was already, and the best path to it. It wasn’t that high up, compared to other things he’d snuck out of here and slipped up his sleeve. 

Once he got what he needed, he sat quietly, waiting to see if any doors would open or footsteps shuffle across the tatami. The blister pack of pills was far enough hidden in his robe that all he’d have to explain, if someone found him, was the little tin and ceramic bottle for tea he’d swiped earlier, from the kitchen. He didn’t even have to make up a new story for that one. He’d been in this exact position, pressed against the shelves of the closet, enough times to already have rehearsed it over and over. Tsuneyoshi was always slipping him little sweets, after all, and that was no secret to anyone in the house. He’d always smile back, just as he’d been told to, and promise to save them for later as a special treat. He didn’t even like sweets, not really. He’d built up quite a pile in the little two tatami room he’d been given. 

(His mother had been beaming. She admired every centimeter of it, as if she were walking through a grand palace, even though she could do all of it standing still in the center. It was the first time he’d had his own room, so he’d tried to be as excited as her. Matched his smile to hers. He still preferred to spend the night with her, when he could. Maybe that’s why it was hard to get excited for the little space of his own — he was well aware of the reasons Tsuneyoshi wanted somewhere to put him at night away from his mother’s side.)

When the coast seemed clear enough, he slid the medicine out from his sleeve and slowly and methodically bent it at the crease lines until just one of the pills came free with a silent tug. He slipped the rest of the pack back in place and studied the tin again.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know, unspoken as it was. Matsuri ate the same things as Tsuneyoshi, not the food that was served, after, to him and his mother. Rize ate different things, too, and the servants here in the main house also had different sets of food. 

There were clues he still hadn’t put together, of course. Things that seemed obvious in retrospect, or might have been obvious to anyone looking in. But he hadn’t been. It was probably more remarkable that he’d figured out as much as he had. A tiny little bird born in a cage might just think a single room was the entirety of existence, after all. Why wouldn’t such a creature think little dangling bells or pellets of food next to a water dispenser were just the way of the world?

So it wasn’t that he didn’t know that there were some things his mother could eat that Matsuri couldn’t, it was just that he had no idea if this tea was one of them. Even after years of research, he’s not sure that he entirely understands why they could all share a pot of coffee, but not tea. So it was an easy mistake to make.

He opened the tin even more carefully and slowly, used the small spoon inside to pour some of the powder into the ceramic bottle. The smell of spices filled the small closet more than he’d anticipated and he’d held his hand over the opening to stop it from getting stronger. It was harder, to close the jar quietly one-handed and get it back on the shelf, but as he’d caught his breath against the inside of the closet door, he still didn’t hear anyone coming.

From there, it was just a matter of getting to a hot water dispenser, and the excuses were easier to make for that, if someone did see. He knew he’d been caught in the kitchen late at night, before, so he’d already figured this part out. 

He’d tiptoed in his tabi socks down the halls, carefully holding the bottle of tea, back to the door of the bathroom. It was still locked, and he could still hear Matsuri moving around inside. 

(It wasn’t like he’d been spying on Matsuri. He hadn’t known who it was when he’d first walked past that bathroom. He’d had to press himself against the floor and peer under the crack of the door to see. He hadn’t been expecting it to be Matsuri, but he’d gone to get medicine, all the same.)

He knocked, soft and gentle.

There wasn’t anything gross to him about it, the sound of someone being sick on the other side. Like a pet parakeet with no idea there’s supposed to be anything strange about a person changing out piles of sawdust. It was just a part of his world, sounds like that. He was sure that eventually, his stomach wouldn’t even twist, when he heard it. 

He’d bitten the inside of his lip and waited, just like he always did for his mother. Waited until the sound stopped before lifting the latch on the door and sliding it open. The locks on doors like these were easy enough to get around, that he’d just assumed they’d been there as a courtesy more than anything. They were probably like this, he’d thought, so someone could come in and help if they really needed to. After all, the doors he absolutely wasn’t supposed to open had different kinds of locks on them. 

He probably should have explained. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t practiced in his head exactly what he’d say, over and over. But when he’d seen the other boy there, sweat beaded on his forehead, lips pale and hands shaking, the words had just locked up in his chest. He didn’t know why. It happened, sometimes, no matter how much he’d prepared and rehearsed. 

(You have to promise to keep that a secret, okay? He wasn’t actually born with all his talent, as an actor, as much as he seems like a perfect natural. But you know what they say, adversity builds character. And, as an actor, building characters is a very important skill.)

Instead of explaining, he’d smiled. That’s what he’d always done, back then. Kept a smile on his face and played along until he could find his footing again and jump back in, or until the scene ended. Whichever came first. He smiled wide and held out the medicine to Matsuri. 

And he’d kept smiling even as Matsuri growled at him, even as Matsuri grabbed the bottle from his hands and dumped it out all over his head, as the hot liquid ran down his hair and down the back of his robes. Held onto that smile as tight as he could.

It wasn’t until he was closing the door behind him that he finally managed to speak again. “Please get well soon.” He’d meant it. He really had, even as his scalp continued to burn. 

That smile had been glued on so hard that he’d noticed he was still wearing it, tight on his cheeks, even as he’d slid against the wall of his small room. He clutched the empty bottle and squeezed his eyes shut as he forced his face to relax, as if he were ripping off a bandage. He shivered. The wet fabric had cooled fast, but he didn’t have anything to change into. All the clothes he had in this house were in the small closet in his mother’s room.

He wanted to see her. Wanted to lie down warm next to her instead of being alone, cold in this room. He knew he shouldn’t, that he should be glad to have this, to be glad to have this whole big house to walk around in, but he couldn’t help it. He was hurt and cold and maybe even a little bit scared. It wasn’t anything special, just the normal thoughts of a child.

Maybe she was alone, by then, he’d thought. He’d lost track of the time. He spent the whole walk, silent as he could, down different hallways thinking about how he’d explain it, why his shirt was all wet and why he hadn’t just stayed in his room like he was supposed to. If she was alone, he’s sure he could explain. He was sure she would understand.

The house was so quiet, at night. For all the people that stayed here at any one time, there was just so much more space, sprawling hallways and empty rooms that swallowed so much of the sound. He wonders if it was designed that way on purpose, exactly so it took until the last turn before he heard.

He’d clamped his hands hard against his ears and bitten his lips together. The tips of his ears, where the hot water had slipped past, were still burning and raw. It hurt. He didn’t care. Rize was always making fun of him, telling him how terrible his hearing was. If she was right, why was this so loud? 

He was familiar with this sound, too, just as much as the sound of someone being sick on the other side of a door. He felt stupid, even then, for trying to block it out with his hands, for freezing in place like this. For the way his heart had thudded against his chest and his hands had gone clammy against the hot shell of his ear. He’d raced back to his room, hardly thinking about the noise, hardly even remembering how wet his hair still was as he buried his face into his pillow.

—

His heart really shouldn’t be still beating at all, he thinks, watching the visible pulse of it in the swollen bruise-colored tips of his fingers. He can feel it in the base of his skull too, steady against the side of this little plastic enclosure. Still ticking away, even after the countdown ended. He supposes it makes sense. The heart is just a pump made of meat, just a tool to circulate things around a body, same as all the valves underground ferrying water and waste around the city. Both just the most practical means of keeping something rotten moving, with no concern for whether or not it should, or if anyone even wanted it to. 

You see? That’s why metaphors are stupid. The heart doesn’t feel anything. In fact, if he were to try to rip his apart, the same way he’d forced open the closures in his fingers, he wouldn’t feel much there at all. His heart is even worse than his gut. All it could do was defer the pain somewhere else. (I bet you’re thinking about a metaphor again. You really ought to stop doing that. It’s a nasty habit.)

In case you’re wondering, he does know that from experience — what it would feel like to stop his heart from the inside. All it’s really done is given him a sharper awareness for it, the inlets and outflow, the contours of the thing in his chest. It’s disgusting. Diseased, even. As someone who used to work with a doctor once, he would know. 

So of course he’d tried to make it stop. To cure it. That’s the first-line therapy — the most successful remedy — if you ever find yourself in this situation. Any situation, really. Dying does wonders to cure all sorts of maladies. Sometimes, though, even the most reliable treatments fail. Don’t worry, this is a fairly extreme edge case. Apparently, the nests of mutated RC cells up and down his back were rather averse to the interventions. 

Since you like metaphors so much, consider this — if you keep a car running in the garage, filling the whole thing up with exhaust, so long as someone refills the tank and hooks jumper cables to the battery, the car, at least, will come back to life just fine.

And well, it does allow for some rather impressive theatrics.

He’d hardly have let Matsuri get that far if he wasn’t sure of how the next scene would inevitably start. There was still that broken end of a quinque left in the library, which seems like it would have been the perfect chance for some parallels, stabbing it into his momentarily defenseless back a few times, but Matsuri really was no fun at all. He’s not sure how much Matsuri even cared, about the old man, to take note of all the staging. But he could have at least gotten a little messy with it, even if he did still refuse to use his own kagune. 

(There could be something equally poetic in strangulation, he supposes, but mostly because pretty enough poetry can be used to justify anything.)

—

He isn’t sure how he fell asleep that night, his shirt still wet and shallow burns down his neck, but he had. Maybe that’s just the skill he had to give up, for all the acting prowess he has now. Being able to sleep so easily and so soundly even in that place. 

There are lots of skills like that, that only children have. Abilities that go away with time, like being able to wake up every morning and reset, continue on like any nightmares, awake or asleep, hadn’t happened.

There were always more to be had, of course.

Tsuneyoshi came to his room, early the next day. He’d barely been fully awake when the door slid open and he had to fumble the smile onto his face, force a cheerful good morning and apologize for not putting his futon away already. Tsuneyoshi smiled back, which meant he must have managed his delivery, even with sleep still clinging to his eyes.

The old man reached out to pat his head, as he always did. That morning, though, it hurt. His scalp was still sore from the hot tea Matsuri had poured over it. At least it was all dried up by now. The pain was no big deal. Honestly, he wasn’t planning on mentioning it, any of it. He’d rather not think about anything that happened the night before, especially with Tsuneyoshi right there next to him. Compared to everything else, the pain on his scalp didn’t bother him at all. If anything, it gave him something to focus on, something to ground him into his performance and keep him on his toes.

“Are you doing alright?”

Maybe, that was a normal question to ask a child. Maybe this was a totally normal interaction. He’d curled his toes against the tatami, focused on the irritation on his scalp. Smiled, like he always did. Affirmation, enthusiasm, always the obedient child.

“Chiyo told me you were in the medicine cabinet last night. Were you feeling unwell?” 

Ah, so as careful and quiet as he’d tried to be, he’d been noticed after all. 

“I’m sorry for not asking permission first,” he’d said, bowing his head under Tsuneyoshi’s hand. “But please don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

Polite, sweet, a soft sort of boy who doesn’t mean to make trouble for anyone. A pretty little songbird. It was his first breakout role.

Tsuneyoshi raised his chin with an old wrinkly finger and looked him directly in the eye.

“Were you getting something for someone else, then?”

It really was such a deceptively gentle question. 

Sometimes, he wonders if the old man ever used these interrogation techniques on investigations or if those were special, just for this house. 

—

Speaking of metaphors, don’t you think the bird cage is a bit overplayed? So easy to gild, left in full display, an accent piece to fill the world with a little more color and cheer. Well fed and well entertained, a song bird in a cage will usually live longer than its counterparts in the wild, so long as you keep the cats away. 

Less of a stink, too, in an aviary. Much easier to stomach than the floor of a slaughterhouse.

His own stomach churns again, on the little shards of metal and ancient RC cells adrift inside him, sending another wave of nausea sloshing up through his chest and neck, up to the crown of his head and back down. 

It would be quite the sight, to slice open his skin and pull out the ribbons of his intestines, lie them out down a children’s slide and see if he can’t find the slivers of metal in the moonlight before he passes out. The whole thing just covered in black blood, slowly cooled by the winter air. That’s not even a metaphor, just a classic juxtaposition - the corruption of innocence.

—

Calling his mother the picture of poise would be a disservice. There was no shortage of poise or grace in that place - discipline, elegance, composure - such things alone wouldn’t have won her any favor. And yet it’s poise she always held herself with there, kneeling next to the toilet. She could have been sitting dutifully in a temple as she waited, almost patiently, for her own body to betray her again.

Once, when he’d been sick, hidden in a back room in the Garden, she’d brought him a cold cloth for his forehead, and then a warm one when the back of his neck had gone all cold and clammy. He’d tried his best to sit there, composed and elegant like she always did, but his child’s body hadn’t been able to. It was violent and ugly and scary and he’d thought it might never end, but it had only lasted a day. 

He never did ask her how she did it, or why. Not back then. He’d always just wanted to make it stop. Just wanted to stop seeing that strain on her face, wanted her hands to be warm and steady again. So he’d brought her hot towels, or cold ones, tea, or water. Maybe another cushion for her back. 

She never patted him on the head, the way the old man did. Instead, she ran her fingers, cold and shaking, up his cheek, and tucked the hair behind his ear.

“You’re such a kind boy,” she’d say, and it would always make his cheek burn, at the strain and reproach and warnings he’d been too young to detangle past the tremble in her hands and the smell of sick and sweat.

Not that he can remember what it sounded like, now. Not really.

—

He takes in a breath of cold air against the nausea. It won’t do any good, rooting around inside himself. This body is too keen on bringing him back to life to be bothered by a bit of old quinque. It’s certainly found ways to get rid of worse.

He lets the breath out to condense onto the interior of the little plastic enclosure. The temperature outside must be dropping fast, because already the sound against the roof and sides of this little hutch have changed to a sharp tinkling of ice crystals. When he looks out, he can see little pockets of frost already accumulating on the dead grass of the park. It might be a White Christmas after all.

Hey, do you think it really makes a difference, to a calf, if it has a small little square of green to play on? Is it less cruel to raise an animal for slaughter if you give it a glimpse of the sun? Or is that more cruel, to take it out to pasture just enough that it understands the feel of grass, just enough that you can market it at a higher price, or soothe the paper thin consciousness of people doing their weekly shopping?

Does it even really change the taste? He wouldn’t know. He’d never claimed that sort of palette, but he has enough reason to believe most claims of such refined taste are little more than delusion. Not that he wants to think much about meat right now, of any kind.

He focuses on the cold, the clinking of ice against the plastic, the hard surface of the slide against his back and knees, anything but the urge to vomit. It will pass. He’s gotten through worse. He studies his hand again, the dull colors of it finally leveling out. With one finger, he swipes a short line through the frost of the platform. Then another. By the fifth one his hand has stopped shaking. Ten strokes in total, until the whole kanji sits there in the middle of the field of ice.

「笑」

—

She’d hold his hand around the bamboo brush, sometimes still on the floor next to the toilet, counting out the strokes of kanji. He’d do his best, to keep the brush steady, to make each stroke as beautiful as they were when she held the brush alone, at the desk, fluid and agile. They’d write them out, together, characters and poems, recite them in near silent whispers, until everything fell back into the proper, steady rhythm. 

She’d smile then, and he’d smile back and, unspoken, they’d study each other’s masks for cracks or stains before daring to venture out of the small room.

(The servants and other women were always saying he was a mirror image of his mother, after all.)

He knew this was what Tsuneyoshi was asking about. He knew this was why the other woman had told on him, what Chiyo had hoped he’d be forced to confess under the unyielding gaze of the old man. 

He wouldn’t have said anything, about Matsuri, if not for that - this interrogation, and the easy, truthful answer he had to give. 

He didn’t tell Tsuneyoshi about the tea Matsuri had poured down over his head, even as he told him the rest of it. It wasn’t kindness that kept him from tattling, or any hope of reciprocation. It was just that it would complicate things. It probably wouldn’t have mattered much, either way. Matsuri wasn’t playing in the same game as the rest of them.

“You’re such a kind boy,” Tsuneyoshi said, and ruffled his hair against the red of his scalp. There was no edge or warnings, no unspoken layers to it. It was so empty, so hollow and meaningless coming from those old lips, they may as well have been different words all together.

There’s no reason he should remember what that sounded like, either. 

—

He’s been accused of liking his games too much, he knows this. But he’d always been surrounded by them, you see. What else would you call it — all the careful positioning of personas, and cards held close to chests? So many secrets and sly attempts to gain favor or knock someone else down, even a little. That’s all that woman Chiyo was trying to do, lower someone else’s score to raise her own relative position. Everyone was just playing a system of snakes and ladders, moving little pegs around and around the board. 

If that wasn’t a game, what was it? Just life? Just the way it works everywhere, from office buildings to politicians’ chambers to prison yards? Now who's being cynical.

He’s managed to stalemate himself again, on the tic-tac-toe board he’s drawn in the condensation on the plastic of the slide enclosure. That’s three times in a row now. It seems he and his opponent are pretty evenly matched. He considers just letting himself win next time, so they aren’t here, stuck on this playground slide all night, but where’s the fun in that?

Besides, he’s been accused even more of hating the world. So if that’s all this dollhouse society is, just a series of games to play, how could he love his games, but hate this world? That’s a contradiction, isn’t it?

Don’t feel too bad. You aren’t wrong. The world is full of contradictions like that. As is every person in it. The difference between all those people and a ghost, or a clown, isn’t that one is simple and without contradiction. It’s just the mark of a clown to be aware of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- As you may or may not have noticed, I changed the title of the last chapter when I posted this one - there's a theme now.   
> \- If you couldn't follow at the beginning, look up Raynaud's Syndrome. I have so many different gloves headcanons, but like I said, I'm the headcanon equivalent of a multishipper.   
> \- One day I'll pick up the tin of Ohta's Isan antacid powder my local Asian market has, but its not cheap.  
> \- The kanji he writes out is just "laugh" and is used like LOL.   
> \- Chiyo is a random name for a random member of the household staff - who are basically all also some part of V's gnarled tree branches.
> 
> I think that's the footnotes taken care of. 
> 
> Happy Belated Birthday to Donato, he's not in this, but childhood trauma is sort of his thing. Much more appropriate reason to be posting this chapter than Valentine's day. Though it's a day late for either. The Archive claims it's International Fanworks Day, so happy International Fanworks Day. It's frankly the only place this stuff is getting explored :/
> 
> There should really only be one more chapter, and I think you all can guess when I'm AIMING to get it out by.
> 
> That's right, February 29th, 2024. (But hopefully much sooner)


	5. Tidings of Comfort and Joy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, mind the warnings, especially the warning for abuse and implied assault. Also, the gimmicky narrator thing, where it addresses the reader in the second person and such, happens a lot this chapter.

Are you really still listening to the story of some ghost? Is it everything you thought it would be? Really, you have such terrible taste. 

But if you insist —

When he was younger, he’d read stories of a magical dragon, hidden in the clouds. Sometimes, when the moon was just right, if you could get there fast enough, the dragon would descend just to the top of Mt. Fuji and grant a wish to anyone pure of heart. According to legend, only one person had managed to do it in the last hundred years. As soon as he was old enough, he’d ran away from home, into the mountains to find a teacher capable of training him to pass the Dragon’s Test. He’d found one, following clues left on old scrolls, and the gossip of villagers he’d pass on the way. It hadn’t been easy to convince the old teacher to train him, of course. He’d had to pass all sorts of challenges, prove his worth, his cunning, and his resolve. He’d trained every day, running laps and doing push ups as his teacher watched him, a scowl on his face. “If only you had more meat on ya,” he’d say —

What?

Isn’t that a better story? A classic premise, an obvious hero’s journey, and a likable cast of characters — all the ingredients you’d need for a daytime anime. It could run for years. Are you sure you don’t want to hear that story instead? It’s just as true as any other, all full of themes of determination and lessons to be learned on how to achieve your goals. Probably something about friendship, too. It could be very educational. And you didn’t even get to the talking animals yet. Every good story should have talking animals.

No? You’re sure? Fine, if that’s what you want, there’s a super long and boring book you can read, without any good themes or any sort of plot. Just the facts, researched and annotated, all about that house you seem so determined to learn about.

Lots of names and dates in that book, but not even a single likable character. 

Oh, but it might be hard to get your hands on it. There’s only one finished copy, and the guy who has it is kind of terrible. You’d have to be pretty committed to go out of your way to interact with Matsuri. 

Or at least a little bit insane. 

He’s admittedly a little curious, what it was Matsuri was looking for in the index in the back. Which name he wanted to see. His father’s maybe? He’d find it if he looked. Maybe his own, vain as he’d been bred to be? It’s in there, too, but only as a cheeky little joke. He’s a footnote at best. Or maybe he thought so little of the book's author that he expected the name of the ghost to be prominent and easy to find, the longest entry in the entire index.

If that’s the case, he’d be disappointed. It’s a little presumptuous, to write your own story into a history book, don’t you think? 

Besides, which name would he even use?

—

“There you are, Nimura,” the woman had found him at the end of some long empty hallway or another. He doesn’t remember why he was there. It was a different servant, this time, not the one who had tried to rat him out to Tsuneyoshi. There were lots of them, servants of different ranks and purposes. 

Honestly, he can’t remember her name now, even if he still remembers her face. Young, though he hadn’t thought of her that way back then. Kids have a distorted sense of time, you know. Or maybe it’s adults whose perspective is all twisted. (He wouldn’t know. He’s only a kid himself, still. Not even a preteen. That’s why he’s perfectly within his right to be here, on this playground slide.)

“Why don’t we play a game?” 

He really had always been surrounded by them his whole life.

“No, thank you,” he’d replied, smiling and polite, as always. 

“How about hide and seek?” she’d said, undeterred and undeterrable. 

—

Did you know that baby animals play games too? It’s true, it’s in those nature documentaries, and you should believe everything you see on TV. They play tag, and play fight, and even hide and seek. 

Doesn’t that sound like it’s more fun to think about? Two lion cubs chasing each other around in tall grass? Maybe some monkeys dashing behind a fallen log? We can even name them, if you want. 

You know what’s even better? Let’s go back to the talking animals. It’s not too late! Besides, talking animals with names are way cuter and much more marketable than the ones in the nature documentaries. Those serious old men take all the fun out of it with their voice overs. 

They say things like “while they may look like they’re just playing, these cubs are actually learning important survival skills.” Isn’t that so stupid? That’s not at all how it works in Disney movies, and if you can’t trust Disney, who can you trust?

—

She was standing right in the middle of the hallway, between him and anywhere else he wanted to go.

He didn’t want to play with her, is the thing. He’d play all those games, and so much more, when he got to see Rize again, but he didn’t want to play with her. 

“Please excuse me,” he’d said, speaking as politely as he knew how.

“You shouldn’t just be wandering around alone so much, Nimura.” She’d always had this habit of tilting her head to the side and narrowing her eyes when she said things like that. Things with extra meanings that she wanted to make sure he picked up on. This was also a game. Where he pretended he didn’t understand, and smiled wider, and said something like “I’m just going to practice my calligraphy,” and she’d say “Alone? Maybe I should go with you,” and then he’d try something else, and she’d tilt her head even more, narrow her eyes even further, and say something like, “Really, Nimura, I thought you liked playing games.”

(People were always saying that to him. Maybe it’s true.)

Sometimes he pretended that if he played this game long enough, her eyes would be all the way closed, or else her neck would just get so sideways she’d fall over.

Hm, we should probably give her a name just for the story. Whatever her real one was doesn’t much matter. Names rarely do.

(He doesn’t actually know, for sure, who came up with the name Nimura, but it was probably his mother. It’s a pun after all. And she was always pointing those out, showing him all the little games you could play with the characters. So it was probably her that noticed. One of the characters in it, in the spelling of it they’d printed onto his stupid little CCG badge, is an old one from the list of names in the twisted family trees he’d tried to stitch together for Matsuri’s Christmas present. 

All together you can read it as 2-2-9. A constant reminder that he was, in fact, born, in case all the breathing and heart beats hadn’t been enough of a clue. Twice Fortunate. Two Blessings. That was the funnier of the two jokes there, probably. If only they’d picked that character instead. Twice a joke. 

What, did you think because Souta was the name he’d used for his other set of masks that it was maybe what she used to call him? Some name somehow less tainted by that place? That’s a cute sentiment. That there are things that are immune to the insistence of the world to ruin them.

No, Souta comes from that place too, the name they’d written down for him on the family records. Though, maybe breeding charts was a more accurate thing to call them. It probably came from a list somewhere. Really, it could have belonged to anyone. He just had the misfortune of being born next. No one ever called him that, though. As far back as he has memories, everyone called him Nimura. Whoever came up with the name, once Tsuneyoshi took to it, it may as well have been his only one. If he hadn’t started digging around in those records himself, who knows if it would even have been used at all? 

And, you know, even if whoever had started calling him Nimura had meant it, about the blessings, about the fortune — even if his mother had intended the name as a genuine deluded bit of hope for her son, it would still have been sullied by every mouth that spoke it.)

“Why don’t you hide first, Nimura?”

They’d ended up playing after all. Hide and seek seems simple enough, doesn’t it? It’s not as if he didn’t know hundreds of spots in that house to hide. But it’s not as if she didn’t know just as many to look. And, of course, once she found him, he couldn’t exactly use that spot again. 

Remember the nature documentaries? It’s not that the little baby monkeys aren’t learning something important, checking behind fallen branches or inside logs, it’s just that little baby humans aren’t much different. Or little baby ghouls. So whatever they were, scurrying around that big ostentatious house, cats or mice, looking for places to hide or places to find someone, it probably wasn’t anything different.

We never did pick a name for her, did we? How about Momo? That’s a good name for a talking animal, at least.

He’d hidden from Momo in the most obvious place he could think of. Sometimes you win one game by losing another (this is true). But he hadn’t won any with that, hiding behind the old ornate chair in the library. She’d dragged him out by the sleeve of his robe and looked at him, eyes narrow, head cocked, and said “I know you can do better than that.” 

Which meant it was his turn to hide, again. This is one of those survival lessons games are meant to teach you, even if most kids are too stupid to learn it. The rules are made up. People break them all the time and just get away with it.

He didn’t want to play with her anymore. He wanted to stay in this big library and find a book with lots of kanji he didn’t know, and try to look them up in the dictionary, to practice them and all their different meanings so the next time Tsuneyoshi asked him to read, he’d get even farther before making a mistake. He wanted to get all the way to the end of a book so that Tsuneyoshi might ask him to pick the next one, and he could ask to see one of the books he knew he wasn’t allowed to touch on his own. 

A lot of the books in the libraries in the main house weren’t actually for reading, but he hadn’t understood the nuances of antiques and rare books and status symbols. All he knew is that pop-up books were supposed to be for kids, but he wasn’t allowed to see the ones in the library in the main house, only the old ones that didn’t pop right that got sent down to the garden. 

Isn’t that stupid? Hoarding children’s books in pristine condition, for their value not as art, or as stories, but as a collector’s item. 

Is it even worth pointing out the irony? They took better care of those rare books than they did the children they were written for.

(Hey, did you know that by percent, the hair on a newborn baby’s head contains more gold than the entire crust of the earth?)

He’d walked the long way around to the reading room Matsuri was in. He’d seen him go in there, before Momo had cornered him, and he knew Matsuri well enough to know he was still there now. He’d thought maybe Momo wouldn’t open the door, if Matsuri were in there. Or if she did, maybe she’d close it fast and not notice him, hidden inside.

He doesn’t know why he thought Matsuri would let him hide there, but Matsuri was the closest thing to another kid around, and so maybe he’d assumed, foolishly, he’d understand the game. Of course he didn’t. Matsuri never played these sorts of games.

Momo wore masks too, even if he likes to think he’s better at it than she ever was. Because he’d held his as he watched hers twist and break as she dragged him out of that room and back down the hallway. She was strong, not as strong as Rize, but strong enough that it hurt when she squeezed his arm as she pulled. He’d kept his mask on, though, because he was a good child actor who was always ready when he had to be on stage. 

But you know this refrain by now. He’d smiled, he’d always been smiling.

—

Matsuri’s Christmas present is bound up nicely like all those first edition books. He’d gone with high-quality leather, accented with gold leaf. He’d debated binding it in human skin at some point, but decided against it. Not that it’d have been that hard to do. There are a few books like that, in museums and archives around the world and every once in a while there’s a headline about them, or some clickbait video, always with words like ‘morbid’ or ‘grotesque.’ Frankly, he figured it might overshadow the rest of it, going that route. 

He’d left his name off of it too, so, shameless as he’s always been, Matsuri is more than able to pass the work off as his own, or claim he found it with his own effort and dedication. He has so much pride in the name he so easily threw away, that he might just claim the thing was commissioned by his dear father and he’d only just tracked it down. He’d been so nice, giving Matsuri options.

He’d known, of course, that this was the exact task Matsuri was making his own rather pathetic attempts at completing. It would hardly have been much of a punchline otherwise. He’d known, too, that Matsuri would be upset about all the documents he couldn’t find, when he’d finally gone looking through that still empty mansion, years later, just as he’d known exactly how long Matsuri must have waited. Ghosts can walk through walls, you know, but it’s quite the hassle to float through all those fences and other safeguards still around the place. He wonders who thinks they’ll own it someday, that they’re keeping it all nice like that rather than burning it down. But of course, they did the same thing to the CCG, so there’s no reason to be surprised.

Matsuri certainly took his time starting the project. The privileged scion of a dead house has that kind of time, he supposes. But it’s not a luxury everyone has. He’d had quite the stack of research notes piling up years before Matsuri even considered the idea. And what is it they say about ghosts and unfinished business?

He doesn’t imagine Matsuri has spent much effort thinking about things from anyone’s point of view other than his own, but unraveling their shared bloody history isn’t the only thing he’s always been better at than Matsuri. It must hurt, just a little bit. This one small glimmer of the venerable life he’d been working towards since he was a child, the one project he has left to do for that legacy, and that damn brat his grandfather had played with like a little doll for a few years had come back from the grave to take even that from him.

Well, it’s not like he ever had a grave. Maybe if he had, he’d have done Matsuri the favor and stayed inside it.

He reaches an arm out of the plastic enclosure of the slide and holds it there until a few snowflakes make their way onto the sleeve of the old black coat. It’s actually snowing now, big flakes you can see with the naked eye. He pulls it back in and tries to get a glimpse at the structure of them before they melt into the fabric.

—

He’d played the game how she’d wanted, after that. There’s another life skill you’re supposed to learn in games, how to take a loss and when to retreat. But he’s pretty sure no one at all has ever learned that lesson. 

She’d lost a game, too, though, so maybe they were even. Rather than leave it all to insinuation, to the narrowing of her gaze and tilt of her head, she’d spelled it out for him. Bothering the young master like that, after wandering off on his own all day, making this so difficult for everyone. She’d held his arm, tighter and tighter, listing off all the things she might say, all the people she might tell how troublesome he’d been being. What would his mother think about that? And what would Tsuneyoshi think about that? 

He’d hid in one of the linen closets, tucked behind a stack of bedsheets, curled up with his knees to his chest. Not all that different from how he’s sitting now, though he wouldn’t be able to fit in there anymore, even with all the linens taken out. But it wasn’t so bad. It was quiet, and no one could see him, and he was pretty sure, even if she tried to deny they’d been playing, he couldn’t get in too much trouble for this. He’d ran it around in his head, of course, practiced, of course, what he might say, but he’d gone through quite a few rehearsals and Momo hadn’t found him yet. 

So he’d moved on to other kinds of rehearsals for other kinds of plays. He’d play a samurai, or maybe a ninja, or one of those western knights with shiny metal armor. Or maybe he’d play at being a pirate. He’d closed his eyes and leaned against the wood of the closet and pretended it was a ship at sea. He’d woven together all the movies and stories and poems in his head to the point where he could almost imagine it, take the way an empty bottle would rock back and forth in the bath and feel himself inside it, swaying as he walked around on the deck, looking out and out at nothing but the ocean.

It was easy to lose track of time, tucked away like that, in the dark. Maybe she would just never find him. Maybe he’d sit there, in the back of the closet like a forgotten little toy forever. Maybe she never did, and he just moved on from playing pirate to playing CCG officer to playing chairmen to playing at being a ghost in Matsuri’s apartment on Christmas Eve. He was such an imaginative child after all.

Maybe she’ll open the closet any minute, acting all triumphant for being the one to find Tsuneyoshi’s lost doll. He’ll be extra sure not to tell the old man about how many swords fit into his back, when she does.

Just kidding.

—

Still, he sort of wishes he’d kept Matsuri’s phone, for the clock. It’s after midnight, but it’s hard to say much more than that. He’d turned Matsuri’s phone off and left it in the little oven that must have come with his kitchen, just because he thought it was a funny place to put it. Matsuri would never think to look in there, and either he’d never use the thing at all, or he’d fry his own phone preheating it to cook whatever meat he was getting these days, and both were funny throwaway jokes. 

He really had been able to unlock it, by the way. The CCG always was pretty lax when it came to cybersecurity and if you don’t force someone as determined to be old-fashioned as Matsuri to use a different password everywhere, he’s just going to keep using the same one. It’s the address and apartment number he’d stayed at when he’d first moved to Germany to study, if you’re curious. You could learn all sorts of things, in the record room and messing around on the computer systems. 

But only things they’d kept records of in the first place.

He never asked his mother if she’d really been to Mt. Fuji or not, just like he never asked her about his name, even when she taught him to write out the kanji, even when she’d explained the pun, and how, if you broke apart the kanji in their branch name, that could be a pun too. One more day.

(It’s a joke he’d told himself plenty of times, getting all dressed up for yet another Bring Your Kid To Work Day. One day more, Furuta-kun. It’s what it says on your badge after all. One more day, and two more blessings. Eventually, part of it was even true.)

It’s not impossible, that she’d actually been there — that Tsuneyoshi had taken her along, as an accessory in whatever entourage he’d brought for a business meeting west of the city. He’d found plenty of such business expense reports, and helped alter more than a few of them himself — the tinted window limousine rides and fancy accommodations. But even with the most extensive access to the records, there was no way to know if she’d ever been there. They were just a shadow, the members of V, taking any necessary risks to ensure no member of the main house might have to go hungry for anything long. Even in their own store rooms, even before the numbers on the books were all cleaned up, it wasn’t like they kept a list of names. The names never really mattered.

—

Come to think of it, the name Momo doesn’t really suit her. Even if ghouls and humans and anything in between are little more than talking animals, it just doesn’t quite fit the woman who had, eventually, found him in that linen closet. 

She’d been the one smiling then, something you could mistake for sweet and earnest and sincere. Like maybe this is really all she wanted to do, play hide and seek with someone to pass the time in that big house. Thinking back now, she must have still been a teenager, herself. But where she’d come from, teenagers were already expected to do all kinds of dirty, adult jobs.

“You found me!”

“What a good hiding spot! See? I knew you could do better, Nimura.” Two smiling masks, playing off each other. They might as well have been speaking the gibberish of the commedia dell'arte, empty tropes acting out empty scenes.

“Okay, now you have to find me.”

—

Since we’re already talking about games, when you play gacha, do you pull for your favorites, or do you hope to get just the strongest medals? When you play Pokémon, do you play with whatever team is the best, or use the ones you like even if they’re pretty weak or mismatched? Or are you one of those people who will like whoever the strongest one is, and make up some rationalization for it? Or maybe you just like to win. Really, think about it. Now, do you think you’d play any differently, if the stakes were higher? 

There were a lot of things he never asked his mother. Like whether or not she really liked poetry at all. Maybe she did. Or maybe it was just the sort of thing she threw herself into to be that old man’s perfect little courtesan, the sort he’d bring along for business trips to the hot springs around Mt. Fuji. Witty and well-read, charming and clever enough to capture an old man’s attention and hold it — the exact sort of woman who would come up with a pun like the name “Nimura.” 

Would you look at that, maybe there was some kind of beauty being cultivated in that place after all. It’s hardly right, though, to expect flowers to cultivate themselves. 

You know, that’s a better name for her, for the woman he’d ended up walking around that big house looking for. Hana, like a flower. She grew up in a garden, after all. 

He still didn’t like that game, still didn’t want to play with her, but still, he’d dutifully searched empty room after empty room. Another life lesson — sometimes you play games you don’t want to. 

Look at you, taking life lessons from a dead man. That’s pretty funny. A word of advice, be careful who you go around taking advice from. Ah, but you probably shouldn’t trust him on that, either. That’s something you’re supposed to learn from games, too. 

—

Sometimes, he’d seen his mother reading over an old paperback book of poems when she was nowhere around that old man. She could have been just practicing, of course, just as she might have been practicing the soft smile on her face as she read.

They rarely ask that, in the nature documentaries, if the animals like what they’re doing or not. When a lioness takes down a gazelle, does she enjoy it? When she grooms her cubs, is it just instinct? They’ll say it sometimes, when an animal does something the people writing the scripts can’t explain so easily. Dolphins, they say, sometimes kill just for fun. Just like people, they say. Just for fun or just to survive. Two neat little boxes that you can put any action in the entire world into. Isn’t that wonderful? 

Really, Matsuri’s not so alone, hardly making the effort to think outside of his own perspective. Sure, you can’t really know what animals are thinking, but we can never know what other people are thinking, either.

In the end, either way, it’s some kind of game. Of guessing, of hiding, of seeking.

—

In the end, he’d opened the door to that empty storeroom with his own two hands. Even though he knew that’s where she was hiding. He didn’t have to, right? He could have just stopped playing, let her get mad and try to tell whatever lies and half-truths she thought might win her the most points. It probably would have been okay. He was the favorite, after all, he and his mother. 

But he’d walked in, walked in on his own two feet. And somehow, Hana was between him and the door again, her robe hanging loose, and her obi discarded on the floor. Maybe he’d been looking at that, and hadn’t noticed her move. Maybe she was waiting, right up against the wall. Maybe he’d just stepped too far in. He doesn’t really remember. It hardly matters. In fact, none of this does. 

Why do you even want to hear this story? Everyone involved has been dead for years.

—

His fingers have gotten so cold again. He reaches for the gloves in the pocket of his coat and brushes against the sliver of steel he’d dropped in there. He pulls that out instead, angles it between two fingers until it glints off a street lamp outside. It’s almost festive. If you hung this little slice of metal on a tree, it wouldn’t look at all out of place. Still so reflective after all these years and a trip through the labyrinth of his guts.

Did you know there are upwards of 15 meters of twisting tunnels of blood and viscera inside a person’s stomach?

Did you know that everyone’s got a hole right through the middle of them? 

He pinches the jagged little ornament tighter and tighter between his fingers. 

“Hey, Matsuri,” he thinks, “let’s play a game.” Are there enough RC cells in this slice of metal for it to cut, or was the forging too crude and his own mutant digestive system too efficient for that? “I know you aren’t one for games, but just this once.” No? Oh well.

The metal shifts out from between his cold fingers and ricochets down the playground slide. It makes the strangest noise, metal on metal on ice. Even after it falls off the bottom of it, he can see the path it took through the light dusting of white that had managed to accumulate there. He looks back at his fingers, nearly as pale, again, as the frost. That probably means he’d won that little game, but it’s hard to say for sure. Such a small thing could heal without him even noticing these days, and he couldn’t tell you, either, how long he'd spent staring down the length of the slide at the jagged cut left through the middle of the snow.

—

Her fingers had been cold against his lips. He remembers that. And against his chin, and his cheeks.

“You really are so pretty.”

People were always saying he was a mirror image of his mother. Such a pretty little bird, such a well-behaved ornate little doll.

“What a waste.” 

—

There’s no point in telling you the rest of it. It’s nothing special. 

There’s nothing special about the way the word “beautiful” sounded so ugly on Hana's lips. Or Momo's. You can call her whatever you want. You know what they say about garden roses by any other name. The name hardly matters.

The woman who used to gather up all those bodies for the auctions had been obsessed with beauty, too. She’d asked him once, when he’d come back to pick up the unsold bulk merchandise for Kanou, if he thought she was beautiful. The quintessential slit-mouth woman. And what had all that preoccupation with it gotten her? It hadn’t saved her in the least. Hadn’t made her life or death any less ugly. It certainly hadn’t stopped them from shoving her organs into a suitcase.

—

There’s a lot of things he never asked his mother, and lots of things she’d never told him. There were things he never told her, too. Things that just wouldn’t do any good to tell.

But you, you really were so insistent.

Did you enjoy it? The story of the ghost you wanted to hear so badly? It wasn’t any fun at all, was it.

Bet you didn’t laugh, not even once. Even though you promised you would. Well, that’s okay. Only an idiot would believe a promise like that.

He’s seen Mt. Fuji for himself, you know. Climbed all the way to the very top. He’s seen the forests and the oceans, too. Poems were just pretty little lies, just as stylized and selective as those lines of ink and wood cuts that had come along with them. Besides, if natural beauty counted for anything, why are trees at the base of that mountain full of corpses?

What good did that old worn paperback of Hakushuu his mother left down in the garden ever do for anyone. No amount of pretty words could bring a body back to life. No, the only thing that can do that in all his rather extensive experience is more ugliness and more death. All the infinite imagination of a city is capable of is pain and slaughter.

That's the other thing about ghost stories. They rarely change the world, not really. Even when the ghosts belong to entire armies or phantom ships out at sea all that ever comes from them are a few unsettled sailors and an urban legend. So maybe he'd been a fool for thinking even a reckoning that big could change things. What is dragon but its own creature of unquiet death. Turns out not being quiet doesn't cut it for people so numb to the noise.

He doesn’t really want to stay on top of this playground slide anymore, he’s decided. It’s kind of lost its whimsy.

He swings his legs around onto the slide and scoots himself to the very edge. Out from under the plastic canopy the snow falls fast onto his face. He wipes at it with the back of the gnarled kagune that makes up his right hand. It’s a pointless action. More snowflakes just replace the ones he’s brushed away. So he puts the twisted up thing to better use, pulling out the one still intact glove and sliding it back over his still intact fingers. 

They’re so cold that the snowflakes that land on the worn leather freeze there for long enough that he can make out their crystalline symmetry. He wonders if that’s supposed to be something beautiful.

Someone once told him that looking for beauty is the only way to live. That the only other option is to go mad and die. And maybe that’s just what he’d done. 

He pushes himself down the slide. 

He finds the small sliver of metal just under the bottom and picks it up again, and holds it against the leather of his glove.

Beauty is hardly more real than gold. It’s just an agreed upon set of aesthetics. Aesthetics, metaphors, symbols, none of them are going to reveal any grand truths about the universe. There probably aren’t any of those to be found. 

There’s another ghost story he’s read once that starts, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” He’s not sure he counts, anymore, as a live organism, or a sane one, but even though he knows it's pointless, even though he knows its all lies, looking at that little shard of steel, he can think of hundreds of different metaphors for it, thousands of different jokes — so many pretty lies to tell. Without them, without the stylized falsehoods of poetry, it's just a void of vibrating atoms and incoherence. 

People can’t go through life without a story, after all. That’s why he’d spent his whole life writing one. And then, when he died, he’d gone and written up another.

Don’t think about it too much. It really is just a story. That’s all he’ll ever be to this city sprawled out around him, too — just a story. To Matsuri, he’ll always be a ghost.

He slides the metal back into his pocket and stands up. His joints snap and click in protest, but he hardly listens to them, these days. He’s a ghost, after all. 

It seems somehow impudent, to walk across the thin sheet of white that’s just started to blanket the ground — to disturb the shiny, sparkly layer covering up all that mud — but by the time he makes it to the drainage tunnel, the falling snow has nearly covered everything. There’s hardly a trace that he’d been there at all. He looks back over the playground one more time. By morning, there wouldn’t even be the faintest indent in the snow. 

These tunnels aren’t used much these days, not even by the ghouls who still live underground, underneath the little dollhouse they’re pretending to build in Tokyo. It had been, broadly speaking, part of the 24th ward, once, but not so much, these days. These days, something else lives here instead.

“I’m home,” he calls out, into the darkness. The darkness pulses and writhes in reply. He walks towards it, into it, and it moves and bends around him, breaking off into a chattering of figures and mouths.

His own little garden of Bastard Orphans. He really has become just like his family, in the end. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And scene. The curtain falls, the actor bows, please file out into the lobby in an orderly fashion.
> 
> That's really the end this time. If you still have questions, well, he did warn you. Stories are like that, all selective and stylized. But actually, you're welcome to ask in the comments below. Lots of stuff got left on the cutting room floor.
> 
> Did you know if you try to set publication date to February 29th 2021 it just lists it as March 1st? Boo. Well. It's still February 28th somewhere in the world and March 1st in the rest, but I think I've dragged Furuta through enough so I'll spare him the happy quarter birthday wishes.
> 
> I hope the chapter wasn't too disjointed or gimmicky to follow in places. I tried my best to capture a very specific sort of mindset, and Nimura's a pretty disjointed and gimmicky kind of guy at the best of times. 
> 
> Notes:  
> \- Infinite thanks goes to everyone who put up with me trying to figure out the name thing, both with "Nimura" and the pun on "Furuta" and helping me come up with sufficiently 'talking animal' style names to use. Momo means peach, Hana means flower.  
> \- As before, I reserve the right to use totally different headcanons in a different fic.  
> \- Shout out to my grandma's library for the inspo. She wasn't nearly so bad about it, but she did have off limits collectors pop up books. Please don't be mad at my grandma, though, most of those books got donated  
> \- By percent, the hair on a newborn baby’s head does indeed contain more gold than the earth's crust. By percent.  
> \- Books bound in human skin are real, and they are always talked about like that, but you're all Extremely Online so you knew that already.  
> \- If you don't know about the commedia dell'arte, I have wonderful clown related news.  
> \- The slit-mouth woman, or kuchisake-onna, is a japanese urban legend you also probably know about from being Extremely Online. If not, Wikipedia currently has a very handy chart of what to do if you meet her. You remember Nutcracker, right? It's funny, because you know, Christmas.  
> \- Aokigahara is at the base of Mt. Fuji, in case you didn't know.  
> \- Hakushuu is the poet that wrote The Old Ainu, among others, and is referenced a few times in Tokyo Ghoul.  
> \- The quotation towards the end is the opening line of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I recommend it.  
> \- If you read this whole thing, thank you, and also, I'm sorry.


End file.
